Episode 157: Connect Keynote: RTA Product Roadmap #podcast #fleetmanagement #fleetmanagementsoftware

This is the Fleet Success Show dedicated to helping you and your fleet succeed using the experience of fleet professionals and Hall of Fame fleet legends. The show that explores how the pillars of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management all combine to lead your fleet to success. We're glad you're here. Now let's get into the show. Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley. Today we're doing something a little bit different. And we're inviting you into the room at Connect 2024 that we just recently hosted in Atlanta. You've heard Mark and I talk about this event quite a bit as the premier event for fleet managers, where we talk about everything from leadership to fleet to business practices to how to run RTA. So we wanted to share some of the keynote sessions from that event with you, as there was incredible information. That really aligns with what we talk about here on the Fleet Success Show. And today's episode is going to be from Mark Canton, our head of product, as he talks about the product roadmap that we have for RTA, specifically the challenges that fleet managers are facing in the next years to come and how we're addressing that at RTA. Without any further ado, here's Mark Canton, former fleet manager at Fordham University, as well as a consultant who's consulted and looked at fleets for over 20 years, specifically diving into their data. So very intimately aware of the challenges that you face as a fleet manager. I'm pretty well versed on what's coming down the road. So I hope you enjoy.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? I love you too, Jacob. How's everybody doing today? Are you alive? Are you awake? Are you excited about the future? Of RTA. No more hurricanes, thank God. We are past that. Woohoo! How many of you have had your morning coffee? Oh man, I can't see anything. That's not really helping, to be totally honest. All right, if you haven't, or if you need to, give yourself out a little bit of a stretch, a little bit of morning yawning, because we need to go. For those of you who've seen me speak before, I usually got more to cover than I have time to do. And that's no different today. So we're going to go fast and there'll be plenty of options, opportunities for questions. As Josh said earlier, there's going to be an, there is an innovation track. There's a transition track. So there's all kinds of opportunities for you to ask questions about the roadmap and about the various features that are coming. So without further ado, let's get rolling here. First and foremost. This is me. Last year I had someone yell from the crowd, Mark, you need to throw some more pictures. Because, you know, when you've eaten 6 million cheeseburgers, very few people believe that you can actually swing a bat or go skiing. But I can. And now you have pictorial proof that at least I can get into the picture of a softball team and a skiing club. All right. That's my 6-year-old on the lower left there when she was, uh, I think like 1 and change. She's my princess. She's my angel. There's some family for my 40th, and that's my immediate family with my brother-in-law on the left, my beautiful wife, my two girls and nieces milked in there. And that little dude who kind of looks a lot like me, sans the beard, that's my little guy, Mark Alexander. So that's me. And I show you that because you know what? RTA is pretty special and we call it RTA Connect for many reasons. But one of them is, as Josh said, it's almost like a family reunion. Seeing so many of you here, right? It's— you're beautiful, wonderful leaders in the fleet industry. But I have to say, I'm really proud of the type of customer we attract because you're good people and I enjoy being with you. I had a really great time last night. Great conversation. Who had a nice time? Yeah. Let's try this again. Well, not really. I thought it was pretty neat. That beef last night was no joke. Yeah. Didn't even need a knife there. Sorry for the vegetarians. All right. So this is something you'll see our marketing folks say, and I think it's a pretty cool tagline. And, you know, I think it's true too. And, but for us, it's not really marketing speak. That's something we're really passionate about, right? We want to believe what we're saying, right? And that orange in there, built and maintained by fleet experts. So you guys have gotten to meet many of the folks in the industry here. We have well over 1,000 years of fleet experience at RTA. We have award-winning fleet professionals, which, you know, you've seen some of them, Hall of Famers, Fleet Managers of the Year, and so forth. We have dedicated fleet management analysts, and I wanted to call that out. So many organizations have data analysts. And they came from the health industry or some other industry that's, I'm sure, really wonderful and great and challenging in its own right. But we all know data has context, right? Data does not replace experience. It gives experience insight, right? So our fleet management analysts are fleet professionals who are also data scientists. And I'm really proud of that. Our product designers have certificates. That's pretty neat. They're not just there, software, you know, geeks and nerds. I dare to say they are software geeks and nerds. However, they also know Fleet and they're Fleet geeks and nerds. We're proud of them for that. There's not another one of FMIS in the industry that can say that. It gets better. Our software engineers have certifications. They're learning about Fleet while they're doing the coding that builds the software that we produce. Again, nobody else in the industry has that level of dedication to being built and maintained by Fleet experts. But here's the big one. Here's the big one. It's you. You all are Fleet experts. We pride ourselves on being responsive to what you tell us. We're not perfect. We're not always gonna hit a grand slam, but we genuinely care about what your feedback is and we genuinely act on it. And we always have been that way, and RTA will always be that way, no matter what future changes the industry and technology brings. That's what makes us who we are. We help fleets succeed, and you are the folks we wanna help. So this relationship, this family reunion, this aspect, you know, Josh talked about hurt and harm with family. If you truly love them, you tell them the truth even when it might hurt them, but you also prop them up when you think things are done really well. And that's what this event's about. It's to hear directly from you. So don't let, don't hold back. You haven't. Continue to lean into that. And hopefully, okay, hopefully you feel and see that we are responding directly to you, not only today and this week, every year, but in your feedback, in your calls, et cetera, et cetera. Sort of the driver of the you, frankly, is our CAB, our Client Advisory Board. So if you're on the Client Advisory Board, and forgive me if we missed a name here, but if you're on the Client Advisory Board, would you please stand up? Do me a solid. Anybody out there? I can't really see. Anybody there? Boy, if there's anybody standing, let's get a round of applause. Let's get a round of applause. Same for the beta testers. Are there any folks who do the beta testing for us? Can't see anything. Dallin, you got to help me out. Thank you. All right. Okay. So again, everyone's feedback is important and we reach out to different folks. But these folks, you know, they really do put in extra time. They have a fleet to run just like you. They're putting out fires all day, just like you. And they give us nothing but tons of time and attention to help sure that we're driving the product in the direction it needs to be for the betterment of all of you. We try to take a wide breadth of folks from different parts of the fleet industry, different fleet sizes and so forth. And we're constantly changing up the rotation. Um, but you know, these folks really, really bust their you-know-whats to help make this product better. And we owe them a great debt of gratitude. So thank you for that. All right. I can't tell what's better, glasses or no glasses. So quick note on the BHAG. I couldn't help this. Kind of had to add this in. You know, Josh talked about all the savings we've generated folks, and it's true. It's over $197 million. The largest portion of that comes from shop management features like paperless shop. If you don't have paperless shop, please, please go talk to your Fleet Success Ambassador. Please go talk to your customer sales rep. Excuse me, success rep. This thing is a game changer. It will save you time. It will save you money. It is 2024, soon to be 2025. I understand change is difficult, but this will actually give you back time. It will give your technicians back time simply by going digital. And getting away from paperwork orders, you will make your shop more efficient. It's a snap win for you. So please at least consider it. All right. Coming soon. Many of you have heard us talk about forks up and knives out. So what the heck does that mean? And the truth is, I really have no idea. Uh, but I'm going to give my best explanation for what I think it means now. All right. So forks is really about, it's about what Josh is talking about, right? We're going to fork Classic with Fleet 360. And so the idea in our roadmap, when we talk about features that are fork features, it's making sure we get all of those pieces in for you that the folks who've been using Classic for some time need in order to continue with their operations once they move over to web. right? And to, excuse me, to 360. And that's, that's in a nutshell what forking is for us, right? On the product side, this is what we're thinking about. What do you really need to get to the other side of that? That said, there are many folks who are already on web and have been on web for some time, either because they moved straight into web or because they transitioned to web a long time ago. And we want to make sure that you're getting plenty of love too. And you're getting to, to see all of the leading things and the improvements that we can make in web. And so we have this other concept of knives. Kind of think of it as like, you know, keeping the product sharp, right? Making it better all the time. So those features are features that are really just new. They're new to web and they're all about enhancing it and making your life better and making the situation more efficient for you. All right. And so when you hear us talk about, and you might hear someone say, oh, that's a fork or that's a knife. That's where that terminology comes from. The fork is the stuff we need to get done so we can do that fork that Josh explained. And the knives of those enhancements around them. Okay. So some ideas here, and I can't go through all of these because I will go over time if I do, but you'll have these decks so you can, you can get the idea. A lot of these should look familiar to you. Here's an example of the kinds of things that we're trying to get done for you before the forking date so that all of the various features are going to be in place for you. Before you need to, you know, kind of make a decision to move on. And let me make a quick point about that because many of you are, you know, most folks are transitioning and that's great to hear. They're either completely on web already or they're in that process. But some folks kind of feel like, man, I need everything to be there before I move. And I think that that's a missed opportunity for you. And it's certainly a missed opportunity for us. So if you, if you are one of those folks, you know, I encourage you get onto 360, use it because that's where you can identify, hey, this is where a gap maybe is. And you can give that feedback and you can make sure we get you covered. Okay. So get well out in front of it. And for those of you who've been doing it, you know, we really, we really appreciate that. Okay. Keep rolling. Here's the future here. Now we have some forking features because, hey, that's what That's what forking is. But we also have a lot of knives. This is mostly a knives slide, right? And we'll talk more about a few of these, but we're really excited about a couple of them, Fleet Wiki and Work Engine, that are coming up. A true billing module is on the way and will be here in the next several months. So these things on that first column there, to use the pointer, are all things you're going to see pretty soon. Thinking like later this year for some of them and first half of next year. right? Um, and, and we're pumped. We'll continue to embed Atlantic Analytics. We'll continue to work on fuel management. And we're super excited. One of the big feedbacks from Cab is they want sublet and tire vendor integrations. So we're pushing on several of those with some of the major players in that game. Uh, some of you require advanced hierarchy situations for your organization, for your billing and so forth. And so we're, Crazy excited about the kinds of things that are coming there. And it goes on and on and on, and we'll talk more about some of the stuff in the later pieces here in a second. But first, we have a member of the audience who happens to be here today who was kind enough to tell us a little bit about his experience transitioning to web. So with that, I'll ask your guys' help there. Let's see if we can't get this video play.

My name is Drew Marro. I'm the Director of Support Services for Professional Ambulance and Oxygen Service, and we are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I think it's going on 3 years now. We did not have any fleet management software before. When I started here in 2020, there was no fleet management, no organization, no anything. I felt comfortable with Classic and I felt, you know, comfortable using RTA as a partner, but it just felt like something was lacking so that when 360 was launched, it was like, okay, now this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm used to seeing in a web-based software. I was very excited. Um, so I myself jumped onto 360 and just started using it like exclusively and let my team kind of stay on Classic until, you know, I felt like it was a step up from Classic and easier to use. And then we decided to just stop using Classic. It's rocking and rolling for us. We love it. Embrace the future. You know, I think if you talk to other fleet professionals or, you know, ask them about, you know, what their experience is with their software. You know, everybody's talking about efficiency. You know, how can I find and do things as easy as possible? And, you know, with the, you know, tasks or the different things that you can, you know, manipulate 360 with that are right on the side of the page, everything lives right there, you know, Flick the switch, enjoy it, you know, just, just get after it and go for it. Pull the bandaid off.

It's weird seeing yourself on video, right? Can you stand up for a second? How about a round of applause for Drew? Thank you. Thank you for doing that. And I'm, I'm very happy to say he's, he's not alone. There's a lot of folks who feel that way and, and thank you for that. Thank you for your support and thank you for your continued feedback and helping us to continue to improve the product. But here we are. There is a fork in the road and I won't get into the details of it, but Josh explained come June 30th, 2025, you're going to have to decide, are you, are you going with 360 or are you staying on Classic? So I'm here to tell you about what it's going to look like on 360 if you follow that, that pathway down. Okay. So some things post-fork here, we have them kind of organized into some themes. As you might imagine, we're going to continue to get after Motorpool. For those folks who, there's many of you in the room who kind of live and die by Motorpool. We're just going to keep making that better. There's going to be embedded right-sizing for you. You'll never have to do an analytic again. We'll do everything from key kiosks to, hey, who needs keys? Let's get access via our mobile app. It's just going to keep getting better and better and better. And with Shop Scheduler, I know, Many of you are very passionate about Shop Schedule. We've gotten great feedback about these early versions and these early features. And I can tell you that Jared is super, super passionate about building out Shop Schedule and all the things we're going to make it better. But I'm super excited about things like the calendar integrations with your Outlook, letting customers choose from available times on the calendar that they might want to come into the shop. And all of the additional management that I think is going to give you folks better ways to manage your bays, better ways to manage your staff. No more getting stuck behind the vehicle that's on a lift that's waiting for a part, right? You're gonna, you're gonna be able to anticipate that stuff and get around it. Okay. And so I'm super, super pumped about that. Again, similar to Shop Scheduler, the notification engine feedback has been wonderful, and we're going to continue to grow that for you. I'm super passionate about the ability that we already have to escalate notifications. We all know PM compliance is a constant challenge. The minute you let your foot off that pedal, it's going to go downhill. I'm getting some yeses here. How many of you can relate to that? Right? The minute you think, oh, this is good, I got it under control. No good, right? So I'm a big fan of, you know, tell them once, tell them twice, tell them 3 times. The next time I'm telling their supervisor, and the next time I'm telling their supervisor after that, and the next time I'm telling the CEO. And our system allows you to do that today. And we're going to continue to grow that out for every possible feature that you might be able to think of. So I'm very excited about that. Parts management is also something of a passion of mine and several of the consultants on the team, because we feel like it's, it's often underappreciated. And it's one of the reasons we're very passionate about RTA. I believe sincerely that RTA's existing parts inventory module is the most comprehensive module on the market today, and it has been for a number of years. Uh, and you can go test this against other systems and see what you think, but we're not resting on that. We're going to continue to make it better. And no offense to any of my former technicians out there, but I will tell you, if I, when I was running a shop, I had one goal in mind whenever I'm trying to help folks, and that's to keep my auto mechanics and my technicians as far away from the parts room as I possibly could. Okay. And I get some laughs. So some folks relate. Just everything goes wrong in there. If they go looking for a part, it takes much longer. The inventory gets screwed up. Then you have to talk about Monday Night Football, even though it's Wednesday. God, NFL. Now you got Thursday Night Football. It's not helping me here. Okay. And any— all that time lost. We envision a world where from their bay, your parts mechanics are requesting a part and your parts technicians or your shop supervisors are delivering that part right to their bay. Right when they need it. In fact, that capability is already in the system today. And we're just going to continue to grow that. Okay. So that's, that's some of the stuff, but it's not all. And as you can see, like I said, I can't talk to you about all of these, but there's so many, but I'll try to point out a few that again, I'm passionate about. And maybe as you talk to others, they'll give you some ideas of the things they're passionate about. But one of the ones I know Facundo and Steve have pushed us on, and we're very excited that I believe within in the next year, we're going to have essentially some sort of easy apply for you to apply for the 100 Best Fleets like these folks were talking to you about yesterday, and they'll talk a little bit more about today. We'll set up dashboards. We'll set up other features that allow them to help you and help you get the information you need out of the system quickly so you can go ahead and streamline those applications. Like Sarah said, get out of your comfort zone. Well, we're going to make your uncomfortable zone as comfortable as we possibly can. Okay. So that's kind of the idea. Now we have all kinds of plans for embedded BI. We are the only, um, FMIS in the industry today with an embedded BI platform. Um, many folks, it's beginning to become a trend to use things like Power BI and Tableau outside of the system. Uh, we have one of their competitors embedded right into ours. So our dashboards are powered by that. Uh, we now have page-level analytics, which is powered by that. And that refers to things like being able to compare assets and parts performance against their class and their groupings right there on the same page. And we're just going to continue to push that. And the list goes on and on. Christie is actively working on developing lifecycle analyses for those of you who were in Jared and Christie's class yesterday. She's literally going to hand it to you on a silver platter. You want to know when you should be replacing your assets? Well, we'll do the math for you. Word of warning, garbage in, garbage out. Can't help you if you're putting crappy data in there or if you're not filling out the fields, right? Which we talked about yesterday. Okay. But again, the idea is to either automate or to reduce or eliminate the lift for you, uh, as much as we possibly can. And that's what those BHAG measurements that Josh was talking about really is, is what is the time? What can we save you? We can save you some paper too, but it's really focused on that time, right? Which Josh spoke so passionately about. So these, that's a lot of kind of where our focus is. Where can we save you time? Where can we save you a person? Let me ask you a question real quick. Show of hands. How many of you are not using paper in the shop? Or let me ask it a different way. How many of you are still printing work orders? If you could raise. Okay. And of those who are printing work orders, how many of you have a person who Spends either most or a large chunk of their time, uh, entering those work orders. Yeah. Okay. All right. Now show of hands. How many of you feel like you have enough staff? Yeah. So think about what you could do if you didn't need that person spending their whole day entering work orders. That make sense, everyone? So. Yeah, so a lot to do there. I know a lot of folks are very passionate and dependent on Inspect. We're going to kind of blow that thing up and make it the best DVIR experience you've ever had over the next couple of years. And of course, we're going to continue to make improvements to our navigation. Work orders and POs, kind of sort of the bread and butter of what RTA Classic has been and always was about. Again, we're not sitting on our hands. We're going to continue to make these better in every way you might imagine. Okay. Super excited again about some of the integrations that are coming up that will help with those two on that sublet side. All right. We'll keep rolling. So this is stuff that kind of makes me happy and makes me proud. We have, I've already mentioned a few, but we have several industry firsts and exclusives, and I'm not sure there's a lot of awareness around this. And so forgive me, but my job is to brag today. So I'm going to brag a little bit because I'm pretty pumped about, uh, some of these ideas. Now, some of these are already in the system and some of them are coming super soon. Uh, and again, the ones coming soon, pretty much all of them are directly in response to things that our customers have needed. So benchmarking. There is not another FMIS on the market that has embedded benchmarking. You can compare yourself. To other fleets. We have that for you. Again, as with everything, requires you set it up, requires you're tracking the data, but we have it. And over the next, I don't know, Jared, you're there, maybe 2 to 6 months, we are going to blow this thing up. We're going to make it so powerful and we're going to add so many parts of measurement for you. We're super excited about that. And then a little bit further out from that, we're going to create industry segments for you. So instead of just comparing to RTA, and by the way, some of you might be asking yourself, well, is RTA a good subset of groups to compare myself to? And I'll just give you a couple of points of evidence. Uh, you, there's about 1,100 fleets. It's by far the largest subset of fleets of any provider in the industry. No one close has that many fleets. We have fleets from 50 to over 20,000. We have every segment and industry you can imagine. Within the RTA family. Okay. So if there was a better way to benchmark yourself, um, shoot, I'm hard pressed to find it, at least today. Okay.

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So this is a pretty big deal in my mind, and we know that it's what leaders are always looking for, right? How many of you have report to bosses who could care less whether or not you're doing well or not? They just want to make sure you're doing at least as well, if not better, than the other guy, right? Than your neighboring town or your neighboring school district or the other company, your competitor. How many? Come on, elbow above your ear. It doesn't count if your elbow's not above your ear. Okay, so pretty good chunk of you. So benchmarking is really important for that reason, but also it gives yourself a barometer to know, hey, is this an area I can improve upon or not? And, um, and I think that's really important. And I'll leave that to the other experts' talks about what to do about that stuff. We are the only FMIS in which you can measure stakeholder satisfaction in an automated way and then benchmark that. It simply doesn't exist in the industry. Other than at RTA. Again, I can lead a horse to water, so to speak, right? I can't force you to set this up. I can't force you to use it, but you should be using it. It's one thing to say my customers are satisfied. It's another thing to be able to produce a number that proves it. And then beyond that, not everyone is going to be totally satisfied. What's the old saying? You can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time. You want to know when you're not pleasing people and you want to know why. And if it's legitimate and what you might be able to do about it. And this gives you insight into that. And obviously here at RTA, we talk a lot about intentional culture. Okay. And we have a tool again, embedded and automated, and it exists today where you can measure your employee engagement. Are your employees happy? And, you know, in the world we live in today with the tech shortages and with, you know, mechanics leaving for a dollar raise. Let me tell you, they didn't leave for no dollar. There was more to it than that. Okay? So you really need to have that. Now, it's one thing to say I'm going to create an intentional culture. It's another thing to measure it. Right? And some of you heard me say this yesterday, so forgive me, but you, you, you can't win if you don't keep score. You have to keep score to win, to steal a line from my colleague Tony Yankovich. How many of you have ever played, show of hands now, elbow above the ear. How many of you have ever played a pickup basketball game? Elbow above the ear. How many of you have ever played a pickup game of any sort? Soccer or— okay. And how many of you, um, played a, you know, just shoot around and you didn't keep any score? Anybody? Okay. And of those who didn't keep any score, how many of you won? You gotta keep score to win. It does not count if you're not measuring it. Anything you are not measuring, you are probably not very good at. And that's just the simple fact of life. Okay. Super pumped about some coming soon items here. We're calling this Fleet Wiki. Imagine having the ability to put all of your policies and procedures and store all of your important files right within the software system, right within the FMIS system. And because you can edit and customize the navigation menu, put it right where you need it to be based on the functionality that exists there. How would that help with things like brain drain and having to keep up to date on policies and getting the information out? Right? And there's some other features that are cool about this too. Imagine being able to have a custom resource page. Where everybody logs into and you make your own homepage and have announcements that go out to all of the folks in your organization. Super pumped about Fleet Wiki. Show of hands, would this be useful to anybody out there? All right. Yeah. It better be useful to you. Great feedback from the UNFI folks to help get this here. All right. This one is like an engineer's dream, but it's really, it's my dream. I've been, Speaking about this kind of thing since before I was at RTA. And we're, it's kind of, we're calling it a workflow engine for now. You know, we're not always great with names, so you can always give us some more ideas, but imagine being able to essentially automate workflows in a virtually limitless way. I don't know. There's a million examples. It's hard to think of any one, but suppose, for example, you decide that for your shop, whenever a DVIR comes in with a defect, I want that defect to immediately notify the supervisor, notify the shop manager, the driver supervisor, I mean, the shop manager, notify the parts person, because I want them to look, to start seeing what, what parts might be going out around that, create a work order and a line on that work order, right? Or if you have a sublet, notify your sublet folks, right? That this may be coming. And notifications is just a small piece of it. Imagine if every time you have a sublet work order, you had an automation that said, okay, create a line to go do a QA/QC drive to make sure that work was, was fine. Or imagine many of you deal heavily in governance and you have to do things like review applications for take-home vehicles and overnights and things of that nature, right? Imagine if you had something that could read it and essentially automate whether or not this got approved or not. Well, for those of you who run motor pools, imagine the ability to automate the approval of the, of the rental request based purely on logic. This is the kind of power we're talking about. Okay. And it's also going to streamline integrations, out-of-the-box integrations to do things like Google Drive and OneDrive and, and those sorts of things are what's coming down the pipe. So we're extremely excited about this. This is going to make the program so powerful. And frankly, it's going to put us in a league of our own. Okay. But if you have more questions about that, you know, let us know. You can see that DVIR kind of example written out there on screen. I'm going to jump back to one we already have. Ask Ron, how many of you have used Ask Ron? Elbow above ear. Remember, it doesn't count. Oh, good. Actually a nicer chunk. than I, than I kind of expected, and I'm excited to see that. And that's cool. So Ron is our embedded AI, and he goes around helping you when you need to figure something out. So you go in there and you ask, hey, how do I add a user, or how do I add a line to a work order, or how do I post a part? And it goes out and gets the information and gives you this step-by-step how-to. So no more excuses that you couldn't figure it out. Just kidding. We have training for a reason and we'll put them out of business one day, but not just yet. Not just yet. All right. So again, this is an industry exclusive. No one else has anything like this. All right. Now, one of the questions I got yesterday was, Mark, what are you talking about tomorrow? And I said, well, it's It's the product keynote, so I have to talk about the roadmap and the features are coming. And this very, very kind gentleman said to me, yeah, but you talk about Fleet and I want to hear about Fleet and all this. I said, all right, well, I'll go home tonight after the aquarium and write a bunch of slides just for you so that I can talk about Fleet just a little bit. I didn't really do that, but all right. So what about Fleet and how does it tie into the roadmap? We have a lot of persisting challenges that the industry faces, right? We're still dealing with brain drain. Right. There's so many folks out there who try to retire and they feel like, you know, Al Pacino in Scarface. Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. You know, they just can't retire. They can't go home because it's too much brain drain. Right. They need folks who know what's going on. We're experiencing it with Arte. We're seeing, you know, fleets, longtime customers who maybe have a retirement or someone gets sick, God forbid. And there's other folks who are coming in and they just don't know how the process works. and they're struggling to run their fleet because all of that information got, got lost. These are prevailing issues. We believe we have some solutions for you, and certainly that Fleet Wiki is one of them. Okay. Tech shortages. How many of you are struggling to hire techs? Elbow above the ear. Uh, it's most of the room. Okay. So you're not alone. All right. How do we deal with that? How do we, you know, how do we make it better? How can we recruit better techs? How can we make it so we need less techs? Maybe again, by saving time and reallocating some money from other positions. How many of you are dealing with an EV mandate or an EV goal? A couple folks. Yep. It ain't going away. Sorry. For those of you who were hoping it would, it's not. All right. How do we deal with that rapidly changing technology? How many of you have driven a car that no longer has a driveshaft? If you're not raising your hand, you probably don't know. It's like playing a video game now. It's just a computer signal getting sent to your front axle in many, many, if not most, light-duty vehicles today, right? The technology is changing quickly. What are we doing about that? Your mechanics are becoming more like, um, like, you know, computer repair folks, right? I, um, I have a Kia EV9 and I brought it to the shop actually for a flat repair. That's another story. And it turns out there was two open road recalls on it. So I said, all right, well, can you do the recall work? You know, well, it's there. And he goes, sure. He takes his computer and plugs it up to the ECM, the OBD there, and runs a script, pulls it out and says, okay, your recall's fixed. Has anyone ever experienced that yet? Right? Okay. So it's kind of a different world. Are your mechanics ready for that? Are they changed? Supply chain. And someone's, oh, Mark, that was COVID. How many of you are still feeling the effects of the supply chain? Yeah. Again, most of the room. Okay. And leveraging data. And that's what's neat. I mean, that's, that's really why we're here in many ways. We were here for all of it, but most organizations are really struggling to leverage data. I'm, I'm a pro telematics guy. I think it's a very powerful tool, but I sometimes have to chuckle under my breath when I talk to a fleet that's talking about leveraging telematics and they don't even know how to measure their own mechanics' productivity yet. Right? You gotta be able to leverage that in your own FMIS before that's gonna be truly insightful for you. Okay? So leveraging that is a struggle. And again, we got tech shortages. If you can find a good parts person, they're worth their weight in gold. The fleet managers are retiring, so you got brain drain. So who's got time to go find a true dedicated fleet management analyst? Other than RTA, of course, who actually understands the context of the fleet and can do data science. They're like needles in a haystack. So pretty much every organization is struggling to leverage data, and yet every organization is under more and more and more pressure from leadership to show that they're using data to drive decisions, right? How many of you are feeling that? Again, elbow above the ear or it doesn't count. All right. Keep rolling. How am I doing? I'm doing okay, I think. All right. So some things that I think and we think you all should be thinking about. Artificial intelligence. Are you using it yet? How many of you are using artificial intelligence in your shop? Be honest. Elbow above the ear. A couple. All right. If you're not using it yet, you need, you need to kind of go back after this week and start thinking about how can I use it today to start helping myself improve? How can I solve brain drain with it? Right? How many of you love, it's like your favorite thing to do, to write policies and procedures? There's no elbows above the ear out there. Oh, a couple of you. All right. You love policies and procedures. Folks, we got two volunteers in the front here. If you need any policies and procedures written and you don't want to pay the consultants for it, they will do it for you on their free time. Uh, there you go. So you guys are the unicorns and God bless you. All right. AI can super, super streamline this for you, right? It can make it fast. It can help you find good examples and it can help you take the documents you have, turn them into something usable. And, and, and you'd really update them quickly because policies and procedures should be living, breathing documents that are constantly changing, right? And that's just one example of many. How can you use it to improve processes? How can you, you know, think about your shop? What are the things you can do? And AI can kind of help streamline that. I'm not talking about eliminating positions because you all just raised your hand and said you need more folks. You need more help. Well, for many of you, it ain't coming. Okay. Unless of course you call Tony and he does a staffing analysis for you. And then we will show the evidence that we've— no, I'm kidding. But in reality, AI can really help you improve upon that stuff and improve that efficiency. Okay. You can improve training. You can, again, streamline difficult tasks and so forth. Okay. And it's really great for diagnostic issues. Okay. Now we are already using some AI and let me tell you, um, this is central to our thinking about the future. I mean, I literally think that if we don't have a true robust AI engine for you here soon, I think Josh is going to kick me and Jacob in the face. So, all right. Is that fair? Maybe not. He's not that way, but you get the idea. All right. So this is coming. This is, this is becoming table stakes. And we're way out in front of the industry on it relative to our competition. Some other questions, and we talked about this earlier. You may be focused on stakeholder satisfaction, but are you measuring it? Right? Are you measuring culture? Right? If you're not, well, you're missing out on something. I'd like to call out, if I could, is Amanda Wilson still here? There you are. Um, she did some tremendous work. I did a presentation with her 2 years ago. And she was able to show how, as she improved her employee engagement and her, essentially her, her culture within her shop, it had a direct correlation on the productivity of her mechanics. Okay. It's not pie in the sky, but, but, you know, knowing that you have a good culture and proving it and measuring it is so important for being able to argue for those resources. Hey, I just want a few more, a few more bucks for a pizza party, you know, or to have a competition or to create a better stipend, like some of the examples that Sarah and Facundo gave earlier in the week about the things you can do for your, you know, for your staff. When you can show, when you can prove that doing these things has an impact on the performance of the fleet services, guess what? You're much, much more likely to get more of it and get more opportunity. And I'm seeing some nods. Has there been some successes in the room around that? All right. Okay. So you have to measure it because measuring it is going to, uh, really be the key for using it to continue to improve yourself. All right. Now I got a prediction and I'm not happy about this prediction. I pray that I'm wrong. I hope that you, I hope that you all can help me make this future not the real future, but I actually think that about 15 to 25% of all current in-house operations are going to be outsourced by 2030. And that's sad because I think there's a lot of benefits to being an in-house shop. But the reason is, is because between the tech shortages and the brain drain, and frankly, folks not wanting to work in some of these shops because it's not a good culture, we're going to lose them and we're going to lose them to the big OEMs and other large corporations who have the resources to, to kind of create that. So it's going to become all the more important because it's just going to keep getting to be a harder problem. It's going to be more competitive for techs and it's going to be harder to attract and retain. And now hopefully some trends, there are some positive signs, right? There's some, you're seeing more and more Gen Zers getting into the trades and, and you're seeing more and more programs pop up to help folks get into the trades. And that's great. But just getting into the trades is not enough because then we have to compete with all the electricians and the plumbers and the HVACs and everyone else in the world. Okay. So you gotta be thinking about this stuff. This is all this is meant to be is, are you forward thinking about it? Are you anticipating these issues? What are you doing about 'em? And EVs, everyone's favorite topic. Whose favorite topic at all your fleet conferences is EVs? I think like one elbow above the ear. A few. So here's the thing about EVs. It's going to keep getting harder. It's not going to get easier. Many of you have heard me say before, embrace it. And I stand by that. Whether or not you think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread, or you think they're the devil incarnate, I don't care. Okay. Never in the history of our industry has more attention and focus and resource been given to fleet. So we all owe a debt of gratitude to EVs from that perspective. Okay. And you need to use it. You need to leverage it. It's your opportunity to gain resources. Okay. That said, there are a bunch of issues. It's very challenging, uh, to execute on transitioning EVs. Even the most gung-ho folks who are trying to do it are finding some of these things. And that top list is things you're kind of starting to hear about, or you've been hearing about infrastructure challenges and replacement costs and things of that nature. But the issue that most folks are not quite on most folks' radar yet is things like, well, how do you do take-home vehicles? Most of my friends out west say, we don't, we're not going to do take-home vehicles. And most of my friends in the Northeast are saying, you know, we got to keep doing take-home vehicles. How are we going to manage that? And they're looking at new technologies to leverage, uh, and to go there. Okay, there's still no true universal payment schema. And, and, you know, that's something some folks have heard about it. And I know WEX and some of their competitors are actively, you know, dealing with. But I heard this amazing stat from a colleague who works at WEX at a conference recently. 78% of public chargers don't work. So if your strategy is to rely on public charging, man, you're in trouble. And then there's a whole greater percentage that can't be accessed because they're in a paid parking garage or they're employee-only parking, but they appear on your map. So it just keeps getting harder and harder. How many of you aware? Well, some of you were in my class the other day, so please don't cheat. But for those of you who weren't, does anybody know what I mean? Elbow above the ear, be by charger output versus vehicle input. Okay, good. Not many hands, couple. Yeah, that means that the amount of electricity the charger generates and is sending to the vehicle is not the same amount of electricity the vehicle receives and is able to store as charge. To give perspective on that, imagine if every time your diesel or your gasoline vehicle went to the fuel tank and the pump said, hey, we gave you 10 gallons, but the vehicle said, I only got 8. How do you manage that? I hope you're thinking about that. That's the reality of the future. Obviously, I have some ideas, but anyway, there's some more, there's more stuff there. I won't go through each and every one of them, but there's a lot more challenges coming. We are, we are nowhere in the clear. Um, so what do we do? Um, this is a big one. I asked this question recently to a group of people I considered expert fleet managers, and I got crickets. What have you learned from the pandemic and supply disruption? What have you learned? Safety stock? Uh-huh. Anybody else? Say again? Too dependent? Too dependent on folks, certain folks? Okay. There's a lot that can be learned, and again, that's not what this session is about. But to be honest with you guys, the silence here is kind of similar to what a lot of folks are, and it's not okay. I'm going to challenge you, right? We're going to have honest conversations. We need to be thinking about the stuff. There needed to be major lessons learned. Yeah, things like insurance parts. I will tell you what, if most of you had really, for those of you who did, which is the minority, if you had really solid strategic replacement plans in place, you did not feel that impact anywhere nearly as badly as everyone else did. And I'm seeing a big smile from Sarah. Yeah. Right. So there should be things that you need to learn about it. And if you're, and you know, if you, if you're feeling like, oh, well, we're past it and we'll get past it. No, you need to be implementing the things that prepare you for that next supply chain disruption now. Today, because it is coming. This is the prediction I am most confident of. I guarantee it. I guarantee you there will be another supply chain disruption in the next 8 to 12 years. I guarantee it. Mark the day. And I'm not brilliant or anything. You just got to study history a little bit. All right. Predictive analytics. Are you using it yet? We have a little bit in there for you. We can tell you when your parts are failing. We can tell you when your next PMs are doing, but we're going to explain this. We're going to blow this up for you. Okay. This is going to become table stakes very soon. There's a few independent vendors out there trying to help folks with it. But this is all stuff that's going to help you save time. It's going to help you be more efficient, and it's going to help you with all of those issues we're talking about. Okay? Imagine, imagine a day where you're going to be able to anticipate the exact availability on a specific day, 3 months from now. That day is coming, and it's coming sooner than you think. All right. Keep rolling. Let's get a little stretch out here. We're almost done. I promise I'm going to be right on time. I have one goal for today. It's not to impress you. It's not to make you like me. I hope to get you excited about the future of the product, but none of those are actually my goal today. My goal is to be the first speaker that actually finishes on time. So here we go. I'm, I'm doing all right. We ready for that? So what are we going to do? What does this look like? For RTA, what does our roadmap, what does it conceptually mean? We are going to advance the analytics. We are doubling down there. We know that that's a struggle, as I mentioned earlier, and we're going to help you do it. We're going to continuously expand our dashboards, continuously expand our analytic modules to just to make this easier and better and require less and less time and less and less input for you. And for those of you who are truly analytic-driven yourselves, we're going to continue to give you more tools that allow you to do this yourself if that's where you want to go. All right. The future is bright. We're going to have best-in-standard practice-based configurations for you down the road, right? Maybe for your particular industry or a particular set of circumstances, we're going to leverage our fleet experts to set up the system for you, uh, maybe based on VMRS codes, or you need a class system. That's all coming. Again, we're going to make it easier for you. We're going to make it more efficient for you. We are going to download the consultant. So between the analytics and the AI, right, and all the information that we can now store in Fleet Wiki, we are just going to pump you and pump this system full of all of the best practices, all of the scenarios, all of the things that might help you run a fleet. So one day it'll be more than just you know, checking out a statistic and seeing what your PM compliance is. But imagine a future after you add that dash of AI where you say to yourself something like, hey, why is my fleet availability only at 82%? And the system is going to give you an answer and it's going to say, well, these are the factors for why your availability is only 82%. The average age of your fleet is 478 years old. Your PM compliance is 24%. Your scheduled repair rate is 0%. And all of the various items, and it's gonna help you point you to where you need to be. And then you're gonna ask it, well, what can I do to improve that? And it's gonna give you a bunch of information about how you might go. And it's gonna come, you know, from us and fleet industry experts from all over the industry, and a lot of the information you heard from my colleagues earlier in the week. For those of you going to those breadcrumbs classes about M&R, where we show you precisely the feeder metrics that are feeding into your availability rate and how to essentially be Columbo. I know I'm dating myself. Who knows who Columbo is? Elbow above the ear, right? Okay. That's what we're going to do for you. We're going to be your Columbo, right? You're going to go there and you say, what's going on here? And he's going to go, uh, but what about, uh, oh, that's it, right? We're going to do your Columbo and we're going to help you find answers to your problems. And we're going to have a module for every aspect that you might think of. Okay. I'll give you an example, please, no offense. And some of you do this really well, but most of you, for example, don't do a really good job of disposing your assets. Some of you, it's not your fault. You got to use a surplus. Organization, but you're leaving money on the table. Okay? You're not getting rid of them quickly enough. You're not getting benchmark pricing. And when Josh and I are talking and he goes, well, heck, Mark, why don't we build them a module that helps them do that? And I said, yeah, I guess that makes sense, huh? Right. So that's how we think about it. We are going to event in the next couple of years. We're going to build you a module for literally every aspect of fleet management. I already mentioned a few earlier about billing. I just mentioned disposal. We talk about motorpool, we talk about analytics, pretty everything that a fleet manager or every function within your organization that a fleet might need, or that a consultant might help you work with, or that an analyst might analyze, there will be something for it to help you manage it better and more thoroughly. And it will be a 360-degree view of your fleet, and you'll essentially have the world in your hands, or at least the fleet world. In your hands. All right. So with that, I'm about to be on time and I'm about to do a little dance because I'm going to be the only one. All right. So where do you go for questions? A good couple of giggles. Obviously you see me in the hall. You're welcome to come to me. I'll answer as many questions as I can. I'm going to ask my product folks, Dallin and Enoch and Jared, if you're in the room, if you guys could give a wave. Um, these are some folks who can definitely give you a lot of answers around the roadmap and the stuff to come if they haven't already. Obviously, Josh is our visionary. He's our leader. He can tell you a lot about this. Jacob, if you're here somewhere to give away, everyone's been seeing him MC. He is intimately involved and they're not the only ones, but certainly these are the folks who have their thumb on sort of the future of the product most directly and can probably give you the most information about that. Okay. So. Uh, man, I think I'm doing all right. Consultants lead. And with that, I'm gonna give it back to Jacob. So hopefully you guys found that helpful.

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