Episode 165: Why Your Fleet Software Implementation Is Doomed: The 5 Biggest Pitfalls to Avoid

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Hello everyone, and welcome to the Fleet Success Show. I am Mark Canton, head of product and consulting here at RTA Fleet. and I am joined by my good friend Josh Turley.

Hello.

And I've been in— for those of you who don't know, I've been in fleet for close to 30 years now. Was a fleet manager and transportation director in New York City at Fordham University for a large part of my career. Then I went into consulting. Certainly my focus was on fleet management analytics. And then I found this place, which is kind of like a career heaven for me because we help fleets succeed. And that's what I'm passionate about in my life. Josh, you've been in the fleet tech space really for over 20 years at this point. You've kind of seen every evolution of technology and how it impacts our industry. So you have a lot of experience to talk from here. And well, this is something that's kind of been on my mind recently. So I was hoping that I could kind of kick us off this time. For those who are noticing, we're trying to switch this up a little bit. Yeah, the role reversal here.

What's happening? Yeah, hold on.

So look, as a fleet manager, you know, I've gone through implementing fleet softwares, fleet management information systems, telematics, etc., fuel systems, etc. A lot of the stuff our clients can relate to. And then as a consultant, I often saw sort of the aftermath of, frankly, oftentimes failed implementations or at least unsuccessful implementations. Many times it was incomplete implementations, quite frankly, because of how much time, you know, it takes. And so Over the years, I've gathered a lot of information. I've got to talk to a lot of folks and, and, you know, now I'm here and I'm kind of seeing it from the other end, like what the software provider does. And there's even more sort of dots to connect, you know, than I realized as a consultant, frankly. And so I kind of wanted to pick your brain on this, right? Like, you know, you've been, you've been at this for, for what now, 20, is it 22 years, 21 years?

20+ years here at RCA.

Right, so you've seen like literally thousands of implementations at this point, right? So, okay, so from your perspective, like what are the things that you see that kind of can sink an implementation or sink just the whole process of, hey, I've now decided I'm gonna get an FMIS or I'm gonna replace my existing, whichever it is, and here I go, I'm starting on this journey. There are pitfalls and there's so many of them and I just feel like I see folks step into them all the time. What's your perspective? What's the first thing that comes to your mind? What are the big ones? What are the ones that you think maybe are easily avoidable and yet people don't, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah, so I think when I look at the past implementations that I've seen that have gone really well, the ones that haven't gone well, and anytime I say I'm gonna talk about a pitfall, recognize that the lesson is like what you should do instead, right? Right. The first thing out of the gate when I see an implementation going off the rails, almost always it involves some type of data migration.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And the thing that usually trips those up is, you know, you don't have access to your old FMIS anymore. You're not familiar with their data structure, which, you know, like you're a fleet manager, you're not supposed to be familiar with their data structure. We get that. We've seen enough of them that we can kind of figure it out, but Every once in a while there's something that's like, oh, you're using that in a different way. And that data doesn't exist where it did for these other 5 systems that we've done before. So I think getting clear about what that data looks like, making sure you still have access to the old system, that you're not trying to push through like an emergency cutover to a new system. Because what we need is to kind of not reverse engineer it, but we need to go validate and test. Hey, we moved this data over, is it where you're expecting to see it? Let's go look at the other system. Does it match what you're expecting to see? So there's a lot of QA checks that have to happen as part of that. And I've seen several implementations where that becomes a huge issue. And that can get, that's another thing too, from a timing perspective. If you're bringing over, you've got some data sitting in a spreadsheet or you've exported your data out to spreadsheets and you've done some cleanup on it, it's easier for us to import that data.

Right.

We have utilities that do that. You just do a quick mapping and boom, bada bing, bada boom. How'd I do for that? Was that a good New Yorker? Was that good? That was excellent. So the other piece of this is, you know, once you kind of figure that out though, right? So like I said, we can bring in the data, bring in the Excel spreadsheets. You know, if you're sending us a full copy of the database, you know, just like making sure that you have a way that you can test that data and go through it.

Sure.

One of the things though that I think a lot of people miss as part of a data migration is it's gonna take time. 'Cause it takes time for you to review it.

That's the key.

To make sure the data's in the right spot. But I would even go so far as to say it takes time because you're actually trying to clean up data while migrating the data.

As you go, essentially. Right.

So this is mistake number 1, is not having access to your old system while you're going through a migration. Mistake number 2 with the data migration is not taking the time to clean the data or be purposeful about what you bring over.

Right.

Too many times I see people, they wanna bring everything. I don't wanna lose that history, it's got value.

I need 8.5 years worth of—

Transactional data level detail, right? You don't need transactional level detail going back more than 10 years.

You really don't.

10 years is pushing it.

It's pushing it. I would argue 5 is plenty.

Yep. I've seen 3, like, you know, we've done migrations and we keep 3 years of transactional data. We still have access to old systems or exports or something like that if we need it.

Exactly. Keep a database, you can have aggregate data from older stuff.

Yeah, it's like even financial data, you know how often I go back more than 3 years for transaction-level financial data. I don't.

Right.

Exactly. It might have happened once in a 10-year timespan that I needed to like, where's this transaction? Which customer do we pay for that?

Right.

Who knows? The other problem with bringing over everything is turnover at the fleet manager position. So when you think about this, you're probably taking over for somebody that was in the position. Maybe they were in it for 2 years, maybe they were in it for 20. What I really love is when somebody is like the third fleet manager in a row in 5 years or something like that. So they're going through this and fleet manager one had one set of way of doing things. They had a different set of processes. They recorded data differently. Fleet manager number two decided they didn't like that, so they did things differently. And now here you are doing the same things. And yet you are trying to gain insights from their data which there is data, you know, like there's insights to be had, right? But you're not controlling and cleaning up the data for their processes or their errors or things like that. So you're bringing in over all this garbage. Now, what really chaps me a little bit, what really is like the big mistake, and this hurts you as fleet managers too, if you're not thinking about this, when you're bringing over all this garbage data, you can't magically expect the reporting to get better, right? So if you're leaving an old system because the reporting was trash, Odds are is it wasn't the reporting. Sometimes it can be.

It can be. It can be.

Reporting format's a huge deal, right? Getting good access, making sure you can read the report, all that matters.

Right, but if your beef is about wonky results.

Yes, that won't go away.

Right.

Because you're bringing over wonky data. Right. You know, the old axiom of garbage in, garbage out. There's a reason why we say it.

We say it a lot and it's true.

Because if you're bringing over the garbage from fleet manager number 1 and the garbage from fleet manager number 2, In tech, we like to call it a tech debt. Which is, it's like the old code that you have to maintain and manage. Well, there's also such a thing as data debt. It's old data that you have to maintain, manage, adjust for, and clean. And the longer you put that off, the worse it gets. So as part of a data migration, lesson learned would be plan time to clean it up. To standardize your data, to do what you need to to make sure that it's accurate. So that your reporting is accurate. You don't want to go through all this trouble of having us import your data and then it's, it's still giving you garbage, right? I've even gone so far as to say, if you don't trust the data, don't bring it over.

Exactly.

Start with just master records. Leave the old system as your archive system. And today is a new day, right? Right. Like this is, you know, year zero for you, right? And just start building it out from there, right?

As opposed to continuing to propagate bad data because you're trying to somehow match something that existed before and now you're ruining your processes.

You're just snowballs. Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to be clear, I want to hit on something you had there because I want to— so, so what Josh is saying is the time piece is for you, for you, the fleet manager and the fleet management team. You know, we kind of pride ourselves on being able to implement people fairly quickly, fairly well.

Very well. Yeah.

But we can only do that, right? We have to work with what you give us. And our competitors would say the same thing. So what he's saying is understand that you need to set aside time to do this because We can help you only so far. At some point, you know your fleet and you have to be able to look at that and say, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Or yeah, that's how I want to do this rolling forward.

And I should say every implementation we've ever done has a data migration component. The question is just size and scope and scale. So most, I'm not going to say most, the quickest implementations we do, we can get somebody up and running in less than 30 days. But we're only importing things like master records, you know, parts records, inventory records, employee records, techs. I keep saying the same word. Vehicles is where I was trying to go with that. So you bring it over the master birth certificate data just to set the foundation. But yeah, we can usually do that, you know, 6, 6-hour sessions and less than 30 days. Yeah, you can be up and running really quick.

Yeah.

But if you have a full data migration and you're trying to bring over history, that's where things are going to slow down immensely. A, it takes us time 'cause now we've gotta build a utility to, it's called ETL, Export Transform Load, where we bring that data into our system. And there's back and forth 'cause now you gotta QA that data and you gotta test it to make sure that it's accurate. And is it in the right spot and all that stuff? And so that will add, usually when I see data migrations that are full like that, you're talking double to triple. So instead of 30 days, now you're talking 90. I've seen them go 6 months because, and this is the other piece now. [Speaker] This is right, yeah, we're getting. I'll get to this in a second, right? But, you know, if you're not putting in the time to go through that and, you know, be timely with it and make the investment here, that's going to go longer. So, you know, that will extend it. As if, if you're not being on top of this as a priority number one for you, it'll go from 90 days to 6 months real quick, right? Um, other things with, with data, uh, would just be, you know, not having access to the old data. You know, that can be a challenge sometimes. You got to go talk to IT, you don't, you know, just Sometimes that can be a big challenge as well.

I'll throw in a quick tip if you don't mind, which is, you know, don't be cheap. You know, if you don't have the time and/or the skills to do this, just hire someone.

So I was going to go there next was we offer this as a service, right? When we're doing implementation, we have people that they know fleet data, they understand other data structures, they know what looks right and what looks wrong.

Yeah.

And they can flag it and say, hey, I don't think this is something you want to bring over. And so we'll do a little scrubbing. Standardization of things like class codes.

Yeah, that's a big one.

You know, let's clean that up as part of this. We do that as just a consulting engagement. Yeah, there's no better time to do that than when you're doing an implementation, right? So, uh, I really like that. And again, time is probably your biggest enemy.

Yes.

Um, so buy back your time and hire somebody that can do it. They can do it faster, they can do it with higher quality, um, and you're going to be much happier with the results at the end of the day, right?

Yeah, there's no magic wand and we don't read minds, right? So I do think that's a key piece. Setting aside the, let's say, resources, because that can be time or money, right, uh, is key. And, and that goes even beyond the data, right? Like, you, you really want to— it's a great opportunity to sort of be clear around your processes and potentially re-engineer those processes and, and sort of shore them up, streamline them. And you definitely want your provider to understand what those processes are, right? Because they're going to impact Like you said, some of the nuances, what, you know, most fields are very— many fields, let's say, are very standard, right? Like, you know, this is your license plate number, right? But there are other things. And like our system, there's custom fields, right? And how are you using them and why are you using them? So your workflows, you know, can be very different. Maybe your organization requires 3 people to approve a purchase order and another organization doesn't even use purchase orders, you know, those sorts of things. So getting very, very clear, I think, about your business processes and your shop processes and so forth and so on and making sure that that's solid, I think is another kind of, let's say, skipped step that's often missed. And now here you are again propagating bad practices and you had this golden opportunity to really improve.

You know, we hear that a lot actually, is— and it usually comes in the form of, well, that's just how we do it. That's part of our standard, right? That is— that's the, you know, I'm going to call you Fleet A, right? That's the Fleet A way, right? And the fact is that there's a reason why you're leaving. You know, the other provider. Uh, there's a reason why you're getting the results you're getting, and most of the time it's because there's something wrong, more wrong with your processes than with a system or with training or anything like that, you know. Uh, so I usually like people that say, hey, strong opinions loosely held, don't be so rigid, look for opportunities to improve processes. Uh, we've had clients like this just recently, uh, that they're, they're walking us through their process and we're like, this doesn't make any sense, why are you doing that, right? You You're seriously like inventing things to do. There's a much easier way. And we were explaining this to them, but they were so rigidly held to it. Eventually they weren't a client anymore, right? We had to say, look, this isn't a fit for you. Clearly this was a mistake. You know, here's your money back and let's be on your way kind of a thing. But they were, they were just adamant. Oh, this is the way we have to do it. It's like, you realize that you were at odds with 99% of the industry. Like, let us help you fix that process.

And there's a reason for that.

Yeah. And you wonder why you're having all these profitability issues, you know, like let Let us help you, please.

Right.

Speaking of data, I think another issue that crops up, and this one's hard because you have to have access to a system or do a pilot or something like that, and this comes back to getting clear is probably the part of the requirements gathering and the procurement side of this, is when on a data front you actually don't know what data you need. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, sometimes we'll have a customer come in and they need a, you know, a 20-digit customer number. Well, what's the max length on our customer number fields? How big can we go? Is it 10? Is it 15?

Right.

If you don't know what you need, how do you know that the provider's gonna be able to give it to you?

Exactly.

The worst thing that's gonna happen is you don't find out until you're halfway implemented and the data won't fit.

Now what?

And now what? If you had been clear about that up from the front, well, maybe the provider could have found a workaround or they could have custom designed something for you to help mitigate that. You don't want to find that kind of stuff out in implementation because that will instantaneously delay any kind of gratification from doing an FMIS swap.

Right, right.

So that's something you need to get clear about. Like, what are our— what's our data dictionary, right? How big are our vehicle numbers? How big are our customer numbers, our vendor numbers, our GL accounts? Right. Like, you think about just every main data element you have. How big of a part number do we need? What's the part description need to look like? Get clear about those and make sure that's included in your feature requirements when you go out to RFP.

Yeah. And that's a good point because it puts in jeopardy, like you mentioned earlier, well, now I don't have access to the data. Well, if you gave yourself maybe 3 months or 6 months or whatever it is, and now there's going to be this 3-month delay because of an issue like that.

Yeah, well, now all of a sudden you have to custom build something that wasn't in the plan.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and I'm sorry, but like, code doesn't build itself yet. Yeah, AI is awesome, but it still needs a lot of work, right?

Maybe one day.

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But let's pause on that too, because you mentioned something about the requirements in the procurement process. And I think, frankly, I think we could do like a series of podcasts about requirements, but there's one I kind of want to touch on. Again, having the experience of made a mistake in my life as a fleet manager and then also seeing it from the consultant side. And again, so the one I want to hit on is kind of integrations, right? You know?

Yeah.

You know, make sure you have clarity. First off, what's nice about when you're going out for bid or you're going out for a process, it gives you an opportunity. You have leverage, right? To a certain degree where now you can say to the person you're buying a new, hey, you have to own this because I need this, right? It's hard to go back to someone and add to what their requirements are once they've already been doing that. So now you do that. But I can't tell you how many times here, for example, you know, we call up the integration, you know, the other party and it's like, who are you?

Who are you with? Who are you calling?

Why are you calling me?

Right. So that's going to— that was my favorite one.

Yeah.

You know, almost the same customer that didn't want to change their processes, calling up the integration partner and we're ready to go. We could have this done in less than 2 months, probably 30 days, honestly, to get this integration built. Um, it's not a crazy integration yet. We get them on the phone and they're like, yeah, we can put that on a roadmap for 2025. You might have it in January of 2026, right? This is a critical feature for this customer, right? And they had asked about it, asked about an integration. It's like, yep, this does this, but they needed something extra and the other partner wasn't willing to pay ball, right? You know, just didn't want to, you know, obviously didn't have the relationship with us, didn't have the relationship with the customer, didn't really care.

Right.

You know, frankly, I would have been like, well, let's dump that provider and stick with the one that actually cares about you.

But that's a whole nother story.

That's a whole nother story. They stuck with them. Right. And so it was one of those— it was just like, clearly this isn't the right fit.

Right.

You know. Right. But because they didn't do their due diligence upfront, it became a massive thing. So they were now 6 months into a project, completely lost all the time invested in there because they didn't suss out the integrations, they didn't bring the other integration partner on board, right, to really talk about how does this integration work, um, and if we need changes to it, you know, are you willing to play ball, right? Um, and that's something you'd absolutely— you have to get both partners communicating because it's a bridge, right?

It's a bridge, right?

And you can't build a bridge just from one side. You have to start and meet in the middle. Yeah. Um, both sides have to be willing to play ball. They both have to be willing to invest in the relationship. And hopefully that's out of the box, but a lot of integrations just aren't.

Well, I mean, how many times do we run into something where we tell a customer, yeah, we can do that, but I can't promise you they can do that. Yeah, right.

And we're actually running into it right now.

Into it right now, right?

With a massive customer. And yet the other side is just like, well, yeah, we don't even have the capability of doing that.

Right, exactly.

And it's okay, well, now what?

Now what? Exactly. So getting out, having those conversations, I do think in many cases there's Uh, let's say, I don't know of a better way to say it. I'm going to say leverage again, untapped leverage, but, um, getting out in front and understanding what the appetites are, what the capabilities are first and foremost, what the appetite is for that. And then if there's not the appetite you want, you know, how does that make you rethink the whole thing? Right. Um, and then that brings me all the way back, sort of a step further back, which is, you know, something, you know, I like to talk a lot about, which is having a true data management plan. Yeah, right. Because I think it starts there, because that's where you, you determine your objectives. What am I trying to get out of this tech? What am I trying to get out of this piece of software? What are the things I'm not tracking today that I, I really want to be tracking, and why, right? And I think if, if you start there and you understand that, that kind of almost serves as like your guide rails for everything else, and it allows you to prioritize what's the most important pieces, you know. Hey, when I'm working with this potential vendor, you know, Maybe this element of the software is super important to me, must have. And this other element I really wanna have, but if it's not there, I can live with it. Right. And, and, and having that set up, if you don't know what your objectives are that you're trying to get out of this, and even in you, and, and we run into this a lot, it's like, oh, well I have had a system for 20 years. I mean, I, I, I know my objectives. No, you don't. What are you trying to change? I just wanted to do everything my old system does. Well then why are you changing? You know?

So that's why some guys will come in and they'll be like, well, this is what I used at my other shop. Right. Okay, but this is a different environment, right? You have different processes and everything like that. You know, how do you know this is going to work better here?

Exactly right. It sounds rudimentary when I hear myself say it, but it's, it's not. You know, people don't pause to think about this stuff.

So, and then they make decisions emotionally instead of on facts and logic.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Yeah. What's the old saying? We, uh, we buy on emotion and we justify on logic. And that's the—

yeah, for sure. I call it, call it mental gymnastics.

Anything we need to do to reconcile what I could— it's a cognitive Maintenance is the way to say that, right? There's another piece of this, and I kind of alluded to it with the time aspect, right? One of the things that I see that sinks a lot of migrations and a lot of implementations is time, is that customers aren't willing or aren't able, you know, and I'll give somebody the benefit of the doubt here. Sometimes they, you know, somebody else decided that, hey, this is something we're doing, and now you're stuck with implementing it, which, you know, it's a really rough situation to be in. We coach our sales team as a consultative approach. You know, that you need to be dealing with buyers on both sides, right? You know, it's not just the person signing the check, it's also the person implementing it, right? You've got a whole team, users, etc. Exactly, right? Um, but it's from the ones that don't want to invest the time, like, that's where I see a lot of problems. Yes. Uh, so we're sitting here and we're pinging you and saying, hey, are you ready to have that next call? Are you ready for that next follow-up? We've got it scheduled. Cancelled. Okay, well, let's get it back on the books. Cancelled, right? And We give you a homework assignment. It's like, yeah, I just haven't got to it.

Clean these items in your inventory.

Yep. And so when I see implementations fail, a lot of times it's because they're not willing to invest the time it takes to make this successful.

Right.

You know, they want it all done for them. They want to wave the magic wand and they just expect it to happen.

Right.

But there's work like, you know, like you got a job to do here, guys. And if you're shirking from that, you're going to be really disappointed when the system doesn't work the way you want it to.

Right.

Because you basically just abdicated instead of delegated.

Right.

So investing the time, making sure that this is your number one priority, right? You know, I wouldn't do this during budget season. I wouldn't do this during, you know, like fiscal year end. I would like strategically pick when you're going to implement this, make sure it's not during like a big conference season or something.

Right.

You know, if you're going to be going out of town for surgery for a month, probably not a great time to do an FMIS implementation.

Right.

And I say that because we had somebody do that. Yeah.

Yeah.

I've seen a thousand of these. Yeah.

So, and to tie back that thought back to something you said earlier with the data, real quick, like the, the data cleanup, you can outsource totally, right? There are some things you can't outsource, right, that you're gonna have to need to be— right, exactly.

Yeah.

So identify that early, right? Identify where that is early in the process so that you can, again, where can I buy back my time? Where can we keep that time? You know, to your point—

I'm sorry, I mean, of, you know, like looming deadlines. You have a contract and it expires with a vendor, you may have to extend that by a year, right? You know, so be really careful about budgeting your time as you go into this. Are you willing and able to give this the time it deserves, right? Um, you know, if you can give it time for a short period of time, you know, I call it short-term pain, long-term gain. Um, if you can go focused intensity, get this thing across the finish line, like I said, we can have people up and running in less than 30 days, right? Uh, But that when I see those work is because the client was all in and they were ready to move. And every time we gave them a task, gave them an assignment, they did it and came back and were ready to go for the next assignment. Yeah, they made it a priority, right? You know, the ones who don't— I've seen implementations. In fact, if I went and looked, when we first started doing implementations, we were tracking a metric and we wanted to know how many of them never got implemented. And so we actually have clients that are paying us that never implemented. They figured it out, or, yeah, this is interesting too. We're starting to get some data around, you know, we have clients that never implemented, never used the software, and yet the accounting has been paying us for 3 years. So I'm like, what the heck? What a waste. So, and no matter how often, like, hey, we're calling you to check in, what can we do?

We want you to succeed, folks. Let's get out, make that more clear.

So like we may put them in the passive file or It's like, we're just gonna turn off access to the system 'cause you're clearly not using it. And I don't feel good taking your money. So we go through that process. We actually have a process for that. But when I think about the ones that don't wanna invest the time, that's usually, it's neither priority or it was a priority for somebody else but not this person.

[Speaker] Right. And there's signs too, like of when it is right. You know, like one of the things I'll notice even with our largest enterprise customers, Um, the leader will be there, the leaders will be there, they'll be putting in— doesn't mean they're on every call or they're in every piece of it, but they're clearly putting on display to their people, this is important, I'm investing my time into it, you need to do the same thing. And if we need to make provisions to account for some other work that needs to get done that isn't done, we will do that, right? Um, but I think that there's—

you can almost tell almost in the first few weeks, yeah, how invested they are.

Yeah, you know, and that's the thing, this is an investment.

Right? And you can't get a return on something you don't invest, right? You know, if you're not willing to invest the time, you're never going to get the return out of this project. Uh, you have to be willing to invest the time, just like you were willing to invest the money in buying this, right? Uh, so that's, that's a big mistake that I see, is they're not willing to invest the time. Now, speaking of investing, the other piece I think that people miss is training.

Yes, that's where I wanted to go.

We're really big on training here, right? We include training with every package we sell. Especially from like, you know, we know turnover is a huge problem. And so we want to have continual training efforts where customers are able to train new staff, new hires. You got a new fleet manager, there's always access to resources. But a lot of times what I'll see as part of the onboarding experience, you need dedicated time in training, onboarding. You know, when we do an implementation, we like to say implementation is not training, right? Implementation will show you the very basics, right? How to move around, how to navigate, to expose you to it.

Right.

Kind of get you used to the water, right? But we ain't teaching you how to swim, you know. We're not teaching you like 5 different swimming strokes, right?

You—

we're just— we're getting you in the water, we're teaching you how to survive and how to move around, right? Um, and then pointing you in the direction of here's these resources, you can go watch these training videos, right? But you got to spend the time to watch.

Got to do it.

Yeah, that's the— I can't make you watch it, I can't make you attend. We have live instructor-led trainings, uh, they're virtual, but every month— in fact, twice a month we have these.

Twice a month, right?

And so there's tons of resources available for free, and yet people don't invest the time to learn the product and learn the system to make it work for them.

Right.

We're really fond of saying you can make RTA work for you or RTA— you can work for RTA. Which one do you want to do?

Right.

And we always recommend if you want to make RTA work for you, you've got to invest the time in training. Yeah. And train your people and train, you know, your support staff.

Yeah.

It's not— you can't just train yourself and expect that you're going to be the master of this. This thing.

Yeah, I want to hit that from another angle too, because I'll come in, you know, we would come in and consulting gigs, and to this day our consultant team finds the same thing, right? And I will tell you folks, there is not a system on the market, literally not a single system on the market, that I haven't met at least a handful of fleets who have told me how terrible that system is.

Yeah, every system, every system, our top 5 competitors, every single one of them, right?

And then I was too big as we dig, almost invariably, actually invariably, well, when was the last time you were trained on the system? 13 years ago.

Or the best is, well, I was never trained.

I was never trained.

I inherited the system from, you know, 3 fleet managers ago, they made this purchase.

To your point about turnover, no one who was here when it was implemented is even still here anymore. And it's, you know, well, you know, it's one thing if you've reached out for training or you're looking and, you know, and there's no resources there for you. I don't know, that's probably a sign you need a different provider, quite frankly.

For sure.

Right. But more often than not, frankly, it's the fleet not emphasizing how important it is to get that training and to put that training aside. And we'll even see it. We'll be at onsite trainings and the person will be behind the computer and you can tell, you know, they're emailing this.

So I have a— I actually had that happen. Okay. So I went out to— it was out near Taft, California, right out there now in the oil field. Out there.

Okay.

And they paid for me to come out on site. This is not cheap. You know, I want to say back then we were probably charging for a 3-day on-site, it was like $5,000 or $6,000, right? Which isn't crazy expensive when you, you know, think about like, you know, that kind of thing. But they literally paid for me to be out there for 3 days. And I show up, uh, and the fleet manager's kind of like, well, I'm, I'm not really sure what you're going to do, but let's come into my office for a little bit, right? And so we're in his office and he's like, well, show me how to do this, right? So I had a whole seminar. I was like, where are we setting up? Like, let's go. You know, and I talked to him beforehand, but it was just kind of— this was actually one of my first trainings, so it was really raw. But I'm sitting here trying to show him stuff, and every 5 minutes somebody's coming to the door. Hey, boss. Hey, I need this. Okay. Hey, we're gonna have to come back to this, right? And he would just stop.

I've seen it.

And so, you know, after— I want to say by day— about halfway through the second day, when I realized, just like, this is not going anywhere, I said, look, I was like, is there anything I can just do for you? So he ended up giving me his Excel spreadsheet. He's like, I just need this data in the system. I was like, okay, you paid for me to be here, put me to work. And so he did. He gave me the data and I was literally just importing the data, putting the system in, getting it all cleaned up. And that's what I did for the next 1.5 days. And then I flew back out of Bakersfield and flew back home. And I was like, wow. But he couldn't walk away from the desk. Shut his door. And honestly, he wasn't willing to invest the time, right?

That's, that's the, that's the mistake. That's what I see out in the field time and time and time again. That's one of the things I loved about RTA when, from a distance, and certainly now, you know, when, once I, once I joined, is, you know, we do this cool thing you just mentioned. We do these free monthly, you know, virtuals in addition to if you want to buy on-sites like you're referring to. And the whole point of that is to make sure that it's that when you have that turnover or when we have new features or whenever it may be, there's just no reason not to know or not to be up to speed on what's going on in the software. And like, you know, the old saying, you can lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink.

Oh yeah. Oh man, I know that. I have felt that. And I would say if you're in that situation, right? Like, you know, my advice to this guy, if I was, you know, a little bit older and wiser, I would've told him, look, why don't we go back to Bakersfield? Let's go back to, you know, let's see if we can get a conference room or something. Get you out of the office and now let's focus here, right? If you're going to do virtual training, this is going to be your biggest challenge.

Yes.

It's stepping away from the distractions. My advice to you would be work from home that day. You know, take a day off, go into a conference room, go rent a conference room in one of the locations, maybe something.

Yeah.

Or even just, you know, like maybe your office is, you know, like the shop is down the wall. Go to a conference room at City Hall. Yeah, just like it. A mile or two away from the office.

Right.

And don't answer emails. Don't do all that. Like, just focus. Our trainings are anywhere from, I think the shortest one when you're doing the live training, it goes from like 4 hours to 6 or 7 hours. Right. So there's a full day.

Big.

Yeah. Like just dedicate the time.

Right.

You know, step away and just say, hey, I'm not available. Treat it like a PTO day. The office is not going to burn down without you, hopefully, you know, unless there's like an electrical vehicle fire. It's a joke.

It's a joke. Stop.

But in which case, run away. But the idea is, you know, create the time, invest the time, create the barrier to keep you from getting sucked back into the vortex because your fleet will suck every ounce of energy you give it. Yes. Right. It is. It is a— we like to, you know, I'm not going to say it's a cash-eating monster. It's a time-eating monster.

Yes.

So every second that you give it, it will eat it.

Yeah.

So you have to guard your seconds, right? Pull them back, put them where you need to be intentional, buy back your time and go find a space where you can really focus on getting the training you need.

Yeah.

If you do that, if you're willing to invest in the product and invest in your knowledge and invest in your team's knowledge, I guarantee you, you will get a 100 times return on that investment than if you don't.

Amen.

So schedule that, make that a part of your implementation plan. Make sure it's included. Make sure, you know, when you're doing the RFPs, include training. Hell, I would tell you include it every year.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Just to refresh. There's new features coming out.

New people. You're always getting—

Not everybody innovates the way we do. I will tell you that. Yeah, we're like, if you're using two of our biggest competitors, like, I don't think I've seen a new release come out from them in many years. Long time. So we're shipping releases like every two months.

Right.

You need to stay up to date on those new features. Right. What's, you know, and how do you use them? How do you implement them? So make that a part of the ongoing contract.

Right.

You know, so that way you're going through and staying up to date and you're keeping your fleet as tip-top shape as you can and getting that return on the investment you're making in this thing.

Yeah. And just to kind of pound that home, we'll try to, you know, we talk a lot about working on your fleet, right? Instead of in your fleet. Right. How do you make your organization better? How do you make your assets and your people more efficient and so forth and so on? And to be honest with you, most of the answers to that— not all, but most of them— live in that system if you're using it properly. And you need to be able to extract that out. So it's imperative, it's imperative to do what Josh just said. Put the time aside, learn the system. Don't count on someone else's. I mean, don't get me wrong, don't misunderstand that. You got to count on a lot of other people, right? But you need to be able to understand what it is you're seeing, how it works, because that's going to allow you to sort of you know, see where there's an issue, understand where there's a breakdown in the process, draw the insights from the data and so forth.

Because you got to do your job.

Right.

Exactly. And your job is going to come down to your ability to use the tools at your disposal.

Right.

And if you're not investing in that education, you're not going to be able to do your job.

Yeah.

So I think that's a big, big takeaway for fleet managers. The pitfalls when I see failed implementations is because they weren't willing to invest in the tools at their disposal.

Right.

I'm trying to think if there's other big ones. I mean, there's probably a plethora. Of things that I've seen go wrong. I've seen a lot of them go right.

Yeah.

You know, and a part of that really comes down to the dedication of the provider.

Yeah.

How willing are they to, you know, really make sure you're successful? But it also, you know, a lot of it really just comes down to you. Yeah.

So, yeah. So the big ones we hit today are obviously put aside the time, recognize this, there's going to be time on your end, whether it's making decisions, thinking about the opportunity to re-engineer your processes. Big piece is that data migration, data cleaning. Make sure you're crystal clear on who's doing what. Yeah, right. With those requirements for the, for the product, especially around integrations, as we talked about, is a big one. And then training, right? Like you got to just put the time into training and you got to insist that your people put the time into training. Like you cannot settle for, oh, well, we got to get that vehicle out the door. Like somewhere something's got to give somewhere. And to your point, it's an investment. Yeah, we might have to sacrifice a little bit short term, but we got to understand that there's this long-term gain that we're going to have. And if you don't do it, you're shooting yourself in the foot, frankly, you know?

And I could tell you, like you mentioned, like, you know who's showing up and who's ready. We've got a client right now, right? They're a Commonwealth out in the Northeast part of the country and they're on calls twice a week with you. Yeah, right.

Going through and because they're invested in making their investment, this is going to be a win for them or go home.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the level of investment. Like if you think, oh, I don't have time, like these guys are showing up twice a week. How long are your calls?

2 hours.

2 hours, right? So like, and we're putting in a lot of time. So like we're matching the investment. But if you can't, you know, like that's a crazy level of investment. I'm not expecting that.

Not from everybody.

Not from everybody. Right. But like, that's the level of commitment. When I see clients that are making that level of commitment, I know. And frankly, it makes me want to match it. Like I want to go through a wall. Like I got to— these guys are willing, they're investing the time, they're here. They're showing up, I'm going to show up too.

They want to win so badly that I want to make sure they win, kind of a thing.

So yeah, so I'd say like you don't have to go crazy with this, but be ready for it, right? Be realistic about it and commit. Yeah, anything else?

I think we've hit the big ones. I'm sure as soon as we, uh, call it a day, we'll have like 15 more.

Oh yeah, I forgot about this, this one time I talked to this one fleet and did this one thing. Yeah, uh, or, you know, the failed implementation like you had, uh, you know, the first time, like, oh, I would do this different.

Oh yes, there's so much. Yeah.

But otherwise, you know, again, if you have any questions, we'd love to answer.

Yeah.

If you have— hey, I'm about to implement my own FMIS, even if it's not us, especially if it's not us. Yeah. If it's us, we're already talking to you about this stuff. But if it's not us and you just want to shoot some stuff by us, podcast@rtfleet.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Love to hear from you folks.

Without you, you brought us in.

Oh, I got to send this out. All right. Well, have a great day and Go RTA.

Okay. Until next time, guys.

Take care.

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