Episode 204: Workload, Workforce, Workplace: Rightsizing Is More than Just for Fleet Assets

Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show, bringing you another live session from RTA Connect 2025. This is one of the keynotes that we had from Tony Jankovich as we go through the challenges of rightsizing, but really trying to expand our definition of rightsizing. As keynote is titled Workload, Workforce, and Workplace, and thinking about more than just the number of assets in our fleet, but expanding that to think about how we run, the people, the processes, and the places that we work and how we kind of arrange that work when we think about rightsizing. So enjoy this session. It's full of gold nuggets. You're going to walk away from this one being enlightened as a fleet manager and hope you enjoyed as much as I did. This is a 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.

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So, 5 things that you didn't know that you needed to know about Weird Al. One, graduated high school as a class valedictorian. Attended Cal Poly University, graduated with honors with a degree in architecture. Is a strict vegetarian. Has won 5 Grammy Awards, and he's my cousin. So, that's the relevance. So, enough of the music trivia. Jack Welch was a former CEO of General Electric Company. Jack ran the company and led the most remarkable transformation in corporate history in the 1980s and '90s. He took a struggling company and turned GE into the most valuable corporation in the world by the time he retired in 2001. And he did that by following this simple principle: focus on the critical few versus the trivial many. So let that sink in for a minute. Focus on the critical few not the trivial many. So for the next 40 minutes— well, actually, Mark finished early, so I get another, what, 45, 50, 55 minutes, right, Mark? We're going to talk about how we can apply this principle to your fleet. And just to go back a second, I've known and worked with Mark for a long time, and that is true. That's the first time he has ever finished early in a presentation. So a little more about myself. I've been in the fleet industry for over 3 decades. It happened literally quite by accident. To be honest, becoming a fleet management consultant was never part of my career plan. I had graduated from the University of Kansas, went to work for a public works department for the city of Kansas City on the Kansas side, was managing the street cut. Maintenance program, living the good life, thought everything was great. And then how many people have really looked at their job description? You know, the last bullet in that section that called roles and responsibilities. Have you really looked at that? Have you read it all the way through? The one that says performs other duties as assigned? Well, that's how they got me. So I was doing my right-of-way maintenance program. And then one year during budget preparation, the public works director tapped me on the shoulder. He said, Tony, you know your way around a spreadsheet, don't you? I said, of course. I use Lotus 1-2-3 every day. Does that age me? Does anybody else remember Lotus 1-2-3? So he said, we need someone to develop our first ever 5-year capital fleet replacement plan. So that was the first time that I dipped my toe into this thing we call fleet management. So year after year, my roles and responsibilities within fleet grew and grew and grew. And finally, about 10 years into my career at the city, we hired a fleet consultant. We hired a fleet consulting firm to come in and do a centralization study for us. We had 7 different operations within the city basically managing and maintaining their own fleets. So we had essentially 7 different shops. Running the organizations. So we brought them in to help centralize that, consolidate it, develop a plan for us to move forward, put them all under a single roof. So I worked very closely with the fleet consulting company at that time during the project. About 2 to 3 months after the project was completed, we started implementing the recommendations. I got a phone call, and the project director for that consulting company said, hey, Tony, How would you like to come to work for us? And I said, OK. So I loaded up everything I owned, moved from Kansas to Maryland, and started my consulting career. And that was about 36 years ago— or 26 years ago today. So today, we're going to talk about trying to look at your fleet and understand that fleet rightsizing is more than just about vehicle counts. So we're going to redefine right-sizing. It's more than just a number. We're going to look at how we can simplify the fleet discussion. We talk about focusing on the critical few. That's what we're going to do. We're going to evaluate and align your workforce, your workload, and your workplace. And more importantly, We're going to show you at the end how to integrate all 3 of these essential elements within the fleet so we can have an efficient, practical, productive operation. So what's the traditional view of right-sizing? If I was hired to come into your fleet and do a fleet right-sizing study, what would you immediately think that we were going to do? Reduce the number of vehicles, right? The traditional goal of a fleet rightsizing study is to lower costs. So what we would do is come in with the ultimate goal of to reduce the number of vehicles. Why? Because we can realize immediate short-term savings. But what I realized is this is a very old-school way of looking at rightsizing. It focused almost entirely on data. We looked at vehicle miles traveled. We looked at engine hours operated. We looked at gallons of fuel consumed. We looked at number of trips taken. So this really was a data-driven exercise. We were looking at data to identify the underutilized assets. So one of the things that we would do is try to take the emotion out of our fleet rightsizing decisions. So we hear a lot now about driving decisions with data. Well, we were making data-driven decisions 25 years ago. We were ahead of the curve when it came to that. But I came from operations. I realized that we're missing something here, right? Our focus was almost entirely on the number of vehicles in the fleet. So what we needed to do is really look at the big picture. We needed to see the big picture when it came to right-sizing your fleet. So one of the things that I realized is that we were missing a lot of the operational implications of downsizing your fleet. We needed to start asking the right questions. We needed to start peeling back the layers of the onion. So instead of just identifying the low-use units, and instead of just trying to trim the excess, remove assets from the fleet, lower cost, we needed to ask better questions. We needed to ask questions like, why is this asset underutilized? Why is it only getting 1,200 miles a year? Not just looking at the data and making decisions based solely on the data. So what we wanted to do is to increase our awareness of how right-sizing a fleet impacted the operations. Now remember, I came from the operations side of Public Works. So in our goal, in our organization, my role was to— let's get as many vehicles and pieces of equipment as we possibly can because we never know what we're going to need, right? We would rather have vehicles sitting around ready for use than having a very lean fleet. So we're trying to balance the idea of a fleet manager's perspective and a finance perspective to a perspective of overall operational readiness.

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We needed to understand what fleet management is all about, right? So when I first got into fleet management, one of the things that we realized is that, my gosh, this thing is huge. It's enormous. Fleet management is a monster. How do we put our arms around it, right? So think about it. And I would argue with just about anyone and tell you that there are more business disciplines involved in managing a fleet than just about any other activity that an organization is involved in. Think about it. Think about what you do every day. Think about all the different hats that you wear. So you're an asset manager, you're an acquisition manager, you're a disposal manager, you're an in-service manager, you're a maintenance manager, you're a parts manager, you're an inventory manager, You're a budgeting manager. You're a finance manager. You're a resource manager. You're a people manager. You're a training manager. You're an accident manager. So you have wearing many different hats every day. And we needed a way to simplify the conversation. Not for the people in fleet. You guys know what you're doing. You understand the complexities of managing a fleet. What we needed to do was simplify the conversation for the people outside of the fleet organization. Remember what Chad Kirby said yesterday? Said, if things are too complex, if things are too difficult, what does the brain do? The brain shuts off, right? So if you're looking at too much and trying to provide too much data, too much information to the decision makers, what are they going to do? They're going to take that report, look at it, and put in the too hard file, right? So their brain's going to shut off. So we needed a way to simplify the conversation, and that's where the idea and the evolution of Fleet Right Sizing came in. So again, expanding the conversation beyond just the number of vehicles in our fleet. So over the years, I've understood that what we really want to do is create lasting efficiency protect service levels, and prepare for the future, we have to expand the conversation. We have to move from right-sizing just the assets to right-sizing our organization. And that begins with these three essential elements: right-sizing the workload, the workforce, and the workplace. These are our critical few. So how do we do this? So let's look at workload. Workload is essentially what needs to be done. Workforce are the people that are charged with getting that work done. And the workplace is where that activity takes place. So what we want to do is turn the conversation to a way that we can look at the fleet management operation that would give us a way to determine how we can manage it better, how we can communicate about it better, and how we can make the fleet more available. And we need to understand that each one of these are interrelated. So if we have a misalignment in any one of these, it's going to affect the others. So let's think of these three essential elements is a three-legged stool. Right? If all of the elements are aligned appropriately, we have a good foundation. We have a solid foundation to build on, and our fleet's going to run in an efficient manner. However, if just one of these elements is misaligned or out of alignment a little bit, our fleet operation is going to start to wobble. When it starts to wobble, what happens? We lose efficiencies. We start to find challenges and struggles within our organization. And if we have complete misalignment on one of these— oh, thanks, Steve— and one of these is really misaligned, what's going to happen? We are going to stumble and fall. The first of the W's is workload. What is workload? Workload is the things that we have to do in the fleet. Now, the obvious part of workload is what happens in the shop. What is required to keep our vehicles on the road? We have to make sure that they're reliable. We have to make sure they're available, and we have to make sure that they're safe. So the obvious activities include PM inspections, tire rotations, brake jobs, all the activities that we're doing in the shop to make sure that our fleet is running safely. How do we do that? We need a way to quantify that workload. So how many people have heard of asset equivalent units, vehicle equivalent units, MRUs? Well, VEUs was first developed by the United States Air Force in the 1950s. It's a way that we can normalize the maintenance burden of a group of assets. So here at RTA, we've taken the original approach developed by the Air Force many years ago, refined it and updated it, and developed a process that we call Asset Equivalent Unit Analysis, or AEUs. So again, this is a way to normalize the maintenance effort within our fleet organization. It all starts with a baseline asset. The baseline asset is a standard administrative sedan. We assign it an AEU value of 1.0, right? So every AEU unit is associated with a certain level of maintenance. So we know from our work with hundreds of other clients and our research that one AEU value equates to somewhere between 8 and 12 direct labor hours of maintenance every year. So when you look at your fleet, everything's going to be equal to, greater than, or less than a standard maintenance or a standard administrative sedan. So let's look at a half-ton pickup truck, generally assigned an AEU value of 1.5. A medium-duty backhoe, generally assigned 4.5 AEUs. A medium-duty bucket truck where we're responsible for not only the maintenance and repair of the vehicle, but also the inspection of the boom, the dielectric testing might be assigned a value of 6.5. Now let's look at a police patrol vehicle, right? Generally assigned 2.5 AUs if it's fully upfitted and it's using a hot seat operation. We know what hot seat operation is, right? Multiple shifts a day. So a law enforcement patrol vehicle used in 3 shifts a day is 2.5 times the amount of maintenance and repair effort than a standard administrative sedan. Now, if that same police patrol unit is used in a take-home operation where the— it's assigned to a single officer, used 1 shift a day, we're going to reduce that AEU value to somewhere closer to 2.0. So we have a list or a database of almost 700 different vehicles and pieces of equipment in our database, and we've assigned a baseline AEU value to each one of those. So one of the ways that you identify and calculate your maintenance burden is to identify the total number of direct labor hours associated with maintaining your fleet. So, pretty simple math. Actually, quick story. So, I have 4 kids, so I must be half the man of Josh. So, I've got 4 kids, older daughter, 26 years old, lives in Florida, works for John Deere, 2 sons that are at the University of Kansas right now, and then I have a younger daughter who's a senior in high school. So when we were growing up, or when they were growing up, one of the things that we used to do is driving down the road, instead of playing license plate bingo, you know what we did? We played AEU bingo. So, and true story, we would be driving down the road, we'd pass a school bus and I'd quiz the kids. Hey, how many AEU is that school bus? And the kids would shout out a number. Drive by a street sweeper. Hey kids, how many AEU is this? And we would do that all the time. The boys, "Nah, I don't care about that," roll their eyes every time we did it. My youngest, my daughter Macy, kind of took an interest to this. And so she would start quizzing me, "Hey, Dad, what's that big excavator thing looking over there? How many AUs is that?" So we'd go back and forth. It was kind of our thing, our dad-daughter thing. And then a couple of years ago, again, true story, I'm out of town working on-site with a client and I get a text from my daughter. Open up the text and there's a picture. There's a picture of a truck pulling a trailer with a small skid steer loader on the back of the trailer. And you know how— I don't know how to do it, but you know how kids will edit the picture and use their finger and write on it? Well, at the top of the picture she wrote, "AEUs." And then on the pickup truck, she wrote 1.5. On the trailer, she put 0.5. On the skid-steer loader, she put 3. And at that point, I didn't know to be a proud papa or to be embarrassed. Right? So my daughter, who is now 16, senior in high school, could probably do an AAU analysis. So if you guys hire us as a consulting group to come in and do a study on your organization here in a few years, she might be our fleet analyst. So the other thing that we need to do is don't forget about all the additional workload elements that we need. There's asset acquisition, asset management, everything that's associated with buying new vehicles, putting them into service, upfitting, We need to worry about financial management. Who's going to develop our annual chargeback rates? Who's going to do the billing reports? Who's going to do the budgeting? Who's going to manage our parts? Who's going to do our fuel? We need to understand that the workload is so much more than just the number of vehicles in your fleet. Generally, when I ask someone at lunch or breakfast, I'll say, tell me about your fleet. What's the first thing they do? Oh, I have 500 vehicles in my fleet. Eh, tells me a little bit. But what we really want to know is what's the maintenance burden of that fleet? That will really give me an indication of what kind of fleet you have, what kind of effort it takes to maintain that fleet. So one of the reasons that we keep pushing Scott Rood's class coding session is so important because the AEUs are assigned to a class code, right? So if we assign our class codes correctly and appropriately, then we're able to identify and calculate the maintenance burden. So if you didn't miss, or if you missed Scott's class code session yesterday, make sure you catch it this afternoon. So what we want to do is take a look at the workforce. Now I'm doing a staffing session later today and one tomorrow. We'll get into the nuts and bolts of it, but High-level review of the workforce. The workforce are the people that are charged with maintaining and managing your fleet. These are the technicians, the supervisors, the fleet managers, superintendents. But don't forget about all the other people, the analysts, the coordinators, the service riders, your administrative and the support staff, your Fleet 360 administrator. These are all part of your workforce. And again, what we're trying to do is making sure that we right-size your workforce. So how do we do that? First thing we do is we look at your roster. You look at your organization. How many people do we have associated with the various activities within your operation? So in my sample fleet organization here, we have 7 technicians. Right? So we've got an FTE count of 7.0. But what we really want to do when we start talking about right-sizing our organization, we want to find out what these people are doing. What activities are they involved in? Right? So again, this is the, the entire sample organization. The technicians are on top. The management support staff's on the bottom. So let's go through and look at these. The first one is me. I'm a wrench turner. I spend most of my time in the maintenance bay. In fact, all of my time in the maintenance bay. So 100% of my time is allocated to that activity. However, we have other techs in the organization that are supporting other activities. So Kevin, not only is he singing and emceeing today, he's also involved in the administration of part of the fleet. So he's answering customer inquiries, answering customer requests, talking to the customers when they walk into the shop. So he's only spending about 75% of his time on the shop floor turning wrenches. But he's also helping on the parts side, right? He's also doing a little bit when it comes to vehicle wash. So Kevin's in charge of maintaining our vehicle wash system, making sure that it's operational. Then we have someone like Ben. Ben is another technician but spends his time outside of the bay doing other support activities. So he's helping out the parts operation about 15% of the time, right? He's also helping out the fuel operation. He's ordering fuel. He's managing sublet services, contacting vendors, coordinating repairs, coordinating schedules. We have Shawna. Shawna's like me. Shawna's like me and Zach. We spend almost all of our time in the base, so we're allocating our time 100% to the M&R activity. We have Felicity. Felicity spends a little bit of time in the management of the fleet. She spends about half of her time turning wrenches, a little bit of time supporting parts, a little bit of time supporting sublet, But a lot of her time is spent in managing the motor pool. We have a small motor pool operation, so she's spending time managing that for us. Then we have Carson. Carson's spending most of his time in the bay turning wrenches, a little bit of time helping out the parts operation. But then you see this other category. He's spending about 15% of his time supporting customers outside of the fleet maintenance need. So in this case, and the case when I was with the City of Kansas City, Kansas, We had a phenomenal welder and fabricator. So other departments would always come and say, hey, can we borrow him? And so he spent a lot of time welding backstops, doing work for other departments that were outside of fleet. But we needed to identify and capture that time. So do we really have 7 technicians? No. Look at the subtotal. We actually, if we look at FTE value, full-time equivalent value, We only have 5.8 technicians. And then we do have a full-time parts clerk. So you might ask, if we have a full-time parts clerk, then why in the world are these technicians out of their bays helping in the parts operation? And what I can tell you is, parts technician gets vacation, parts technician takes sick leave, the parts technician is doing other things outside of the parts room. Developing contracts, meeting with vendors. So there's a lot of things that take them away from the parts counter. So what we're doing is we're taking the technicians out of their bay, kind of like Mark was saying earlier, and forcing them to provide other support in other areas. So when you go and request 7 technicians from your budget office, and they say, "No, you already have 7 technicians." What are you gonna say? Well, no we don't, because when we allocate their time to the various activities, we actually only have 5.8. So we're actually short a technician and a half almost. So slack time. Does anybody know what slack time is? So slack time, and I'm just gonna read it because it's such a good definition. Slack time is the dedicated scheduled work hours set aside for employees to explore new ideas, experiment, or develop innovative projects outside of their regular duties, fostering creativity, problem solving, and continuous improvement. Now, I know what you guys are saying. I can see some eyes rolling. It's like, we want to take more time away from our technicians, take them out of the bay more often. Well, not really, but yes. And I'll tell you why. There's been a couple of studies recently. Deloitte did a big study that said 1 out of 4 large companies in the United States provide slack time for their employees. And this is how it's helped other organizations. Google has what they call 20% time. They call it their 80/20 time where 20% of the time employees at Google are encouraged to think of solutions and innovative ideas that are outside of their core day-to-day activities. This is where the idea for Gmail came from. This is the— this is where the idea for Google Maps came from. AdSense came from this idea. 3M has a process called 15% time. They allocate 15% of an employee's time to this type of creative time. This is where the ideas for Post-it notes came from. This is where Scotchgard came from. Facebook has what they call hackathons. So periodically, they pull in groups or teams of people, and they have these hackathons where they just throw ideas against the wall, right? Every once in a while, an idea sticks. That's where the like button came on your post, from a hackathon. Lockheed Martin has a great program called Skunk Works. Skunk Works accounted for the development and the conception of the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2 aircraft. So this type of slack time or creative time is very important. In fact, 70% of all Fortune 500 companies build in some type of slack time for their employees. So let's get back to the workforce impact. So we want to right-size our workforce. If we don't have enough technicians, which I think most of us in here have struggled with before, we understand the implications. We're going to have extended maintenance repair turnaround times. Our PM work gets pushed. We become a very reactive organization, right? We're just simply putting out fires. What's the next vehicle to show up at our door? That's what we're working on getting the work done. Work, getting the work accomplished. And what ultimately happens? The number one metric in fleet is fleet availability, and our fleet availability suffers. However, there are some organizations that have too many technicians. Wouldn't you like to have that problem? So if you do, you're gonna have higher costs. You're gonna have lower productivity. You're gonna have make-work times. Everybody know what make-work time is? So that's where a technician might be assigned one work order today. There's nothing behind that work order. So when they're done, they're done for the day. So what are they going to do? They're going to look so close at that inspection, they're going to identify every single worn element, worn part, and replace everything because they want to stay busy. So they're making work. So that 2.5-hour PMC-level service is now going to take 8 hours because They need something to do. There's also issues if we don't have enough parts specialists. So in our example that we showed earlier, it looked like we had the right number of parts specialists, right? We had 1 parts clerk supporting 7 technicians. That should be acceptable. However, when we understand and right-size our organization, we understand that that 1.0 FTE parts clerk is not really available 20,000— 20— 2,080 hours a year. And what happens? Technicians are taken out of the bays. Parts usage is not being recorded. The technicians run to the parts room, grab it, they're not writing it down on the clipboard, they're not scanning it, they're not posting it, they're running back out to the bay, throwing it on the vehicle, and getting the vehicle out the door. And there's a heavier reliance generally on non-stock parts. If we don't have a fleet analyst position, what happens? It leads to poor decision-making. We don't have someone analyzing the data. We don't have any performance trend analysis. There's a lack of transparency in our data because we're not sharing any data, and we're not able to respond to leadership requests for information on our performance. So What happens? Generally, the fleet manager has to step in, take time away from the strategic management of the operation, and dig into the data. So remember, when we're looking at workforce calculations, we need to identify the total maintenance staff required. We do this, and again, we'll do this in staffing later on today and tomorrow in greater detail, but we take the total number of direct hours required to maintain our fleet We do that by capturing the AEUs. We divide it by the technician tolerance level. Technician tolerance level is the number of hours that we can reasonably expect our technicians to turn wrenches in a given year, which will give us the total number of required technicians. That's how we right-size that portion of the workforce. So per— quick example. If we have 8,000 hours of demand divided by 1,450, which is a reasonable expectation for a technician in a government fleet operation, divide those two numbers and we get 5.5 technicians as our right-sized technician need. So additional workforce issues that we need to consider. We need to consider the skill level. We need to consider certification levels. We need to consider how they're cross-trained, what other activities they're performing. One of the things about skill level is we're working with a client right now that literally has about a 20 to 25% vacancy rate in their technicians. They cannot compete with surrounding shops. They just don't pay enough and they're not going to raise the rate of pay. So one of the things that they're doing is they developed a program where they're really almost taking people off the street. If you have any interest in becoming a fleet technician, They're hiring you and developing a training program. Now, when we bring that body on board, yeah, it counts against our FTEs, but does it really? That person cannot be expected to be productive 1,450 hours a year, right? So we need to understand that. We also have to understand certification requirements. So Steve and Scott Rood just recently got back from Hawaii. Hawaii has a unique requirement to perform state annual state inspections. But in order to perform your state inspection, you have to have an ASE certification. Well, their only technician that had that ASE certification left. He resigned, went to work somewhere else. So they were not able to perform the state inspections. And they're on an isolated island, as Steve mentioned, 10 by 10 by 10. So one of the things that we did for them is we actually went out there, Scott and Steve, trained the technicians on passing the A-Series for the ASE certification so they could have a technician that was certified to perform these annual state inspections. Because their only other option was to outsource, which they couldn't do because there are no other shops on the island, or to hire an additional technician that had the requisite certifications. But then they were going to be overstaffed. So, and they also didn't want to have a single point of failure anymore. So one of the reasons that we trained all of their technicians. Now remember, replacing a good tech always costs more than training an existing one. So let's real quickly talk about the workplace. The workplace is the physical and cultural environment where the work takes place. So most of us understand this is a shop. This is the number of maintenance bays we have. This is the size of the maintenance bays that we have. This is the shop support areas. These are the employee amenities areas. This is where we store our tools and equipment, right? These are the areas under the roof. But what most people forget about is the exterior requirements, right? So not only do we have parking for the employees, parking for visitors, but we need to plan space for the ready line, the deadline, in-servicing, disposal, and other activities. So how is right-sizing the exterior important? Let's say our fleet availability rate is 95%. So our deadline can be very minimal, right? But if our fleet availability rate is lower, something like 80%, then we're going to need to plan more space for our ready line or deadline. So the operational efficiency of your fleet organization directly impacts your space requirements. So let's look at this. What's the impact of not right-sizing your workplace? If we don't have enough repair bays or they're not sized appropriately, delays maintenance. If the parts room is not adjacent to the shop or not sized appropriately, what happens? More reliance on non-stock parts, more maintenance repair delays, creates technician inefficiencies. What if we have poor exterior configuration and lack of wayfinding? You know what wayfinding is? Wayfinding is just signage on your property. So the technicians go out and have to hunt for vehicles. If you have a large fleet organization and you have a customer that comes in, drops their keys on the counter and says, hey, I dropped my vehicle off for a PMA service. See you later. Call me when it's done. Then the technician has to go outside and start hunting for the vehicle, right? They have no idea where it is. If you don't have a dedicated deadline, then they're going to be hunting. One of the things that we do in our facility programming and planning efforts is always recommend that you identify your ready line and deadline by parking stall numbers. So when they drop off their keys, they can say, hey, my key— my vehicle is in stall number 21. So let's talk a little bit about the importance of space allocation. So I did a study for a large county operation in Florida many years ago. Huge facility, almost 50 maintenance bays. So the county maintained all of the fleet assets except for one department. Can you guess which department they didn't maintain? I think I heard somebody say it. Fire. Fire always wants to be by themselves. Fire special. So what they were doing is they were allocated a number of bays at the end of the shop. It was fine. The bays were sized appropriately. They had enough bays, so that was all good. But the problem was, where was the parts room? Parts room was down across a number of bays, but that's not where the parts counter was. They had to go up, they had to go around, and the parts counter was over there. Poor adjacencies. But the other thing that's interesting to note is that from the nearest point The nearest bay to that parched room was 200 feet. The furthest point was 300 feet. Think about that. 300 feet is the length of a football field from end zone to end zone, goal line to goal line. So that's a lot of space to cover. It takes an average adult 2.5 to 2.7 feet per step. So they were walking 80 to 100 steps, 120 steps One way to get a part. What happens when they get the part? They have to come back another 80 to 120 steps, right? So what happens when the technician leaves the bay? What are they doing? They're walking by all the other technicians. We're talking about, hey, did you see the game last night? Hey, how's your family? How was your vacation? So can you imagine the lost productivity by not having good adjacencies. So, all right, I hesitated to put this slide in. People ask for it all the time. A huge disclaimer, these are general rules of thumb. People always ask, how many bays per technician? Generally speaking, 2.0 bays for a heavy-duty technician, 1.5 for a light-duty technician. But understand this is scalable. The larger the organization, the more you can back down on those ratios. Plus, we need to consider, do we also have a need for a tire bay, tire maintenance bay? Do we need welding fabrication bay? Do we have a quick fix bay? Do we have a training bay? Do we have a small engine repair bay? Do we have an alignment bay? What are we doing for upfitting? These are all space issues that need to be considered when you right-size your facility. Some of you are saying, that's great, good information about the facility, but we outsource everything. We don't have a shop. Well, but you still have workplace issues, right? You still need to understand the location of the shops that are used, you were using. You need to understand the distance or the travel distance to each one of these shops. The other thing is we need to understand their turnaround time. What kind of priority are you really getting with them? What's the quality of work that they're performing? How capable are they? If you're a government fleet, you're not going to find a single shop out there that can work on all your vehicles, right? You're going to have to have a network of vendors that you're using to support your maintenance repair. So that's going to create additional workplace issues. What's their capacity? What are their operating hours? What's their communication protocol like? How transparent are the invoices? So we talk a lot about workplace culture. Real quickly, I'll talk about this. An organization that we recently worked with, this is what the condition of the maintenance shop looked like. This is where the people are working every day. How could you walk by this every day and not stop and clean that up? This is the— I mean, this is not weeks of dirt and grime and clutter and Cobwebs. This is years of failure to maintain your facility. How would you like to work in this environment? This is an operation where I worked with recently where they're maintaining school buses. How much room does this technician have on the side of the vehicle? He has less than 3 feet. He's got to pull a wheel off there. What's he going to do? He's going to back right into that fan. He's going to back right into the tools and equipment that are stationed behind him. So the importance of right-sizing your maintenance space. Now, this is what a nice shop looks like, right? It's bright, it's airy, it's clean, it's clutter-free. Everything has a place. This is on the other side of that shop. This is the heavy-duty base. Things are marked. We have natural light. We have reflective painting on the walls. Great facility. People are proud to come to work here. So additional workplace issues that we need to worry about: the number of facilities. Do we have a main shop and satellite shops? How is our workload distributed? What are the locations? Whoops. What are the specialty requirements that we have? Are we pump testing a fire truck? Do we need a pump testing pit? What are the specialty requirements that we have? What's the unobstructed overhead clearance? What if we have an electric vehicle fleet? How does that impact your space requirements? There's a huge requirement. So you have to have essentially a 10-foot limited buffer zone around your vehicles when it's in a maintenance bay. If that vehicle is involved in an accident or if there's potential damage to that vehicle, it has to be in a quarantine space that is at least 50 feet away from the nearest anything. Tesla just recently came out and said, no, we're going to expand that. We're going to now recommend that you have 100 feet clearance between anything and that damaged vehicle. So small changes can result in big impacts. Improve the lighting and ventilation, upgrade your lifts, improve your tools, provide the right information, The other thing that Steve Saltzgiver did for us one time is he did a study for a fleet organization. And one of the things that he's very good at is to right-size your processes, not only right-size your maintenance bays, not only right-size your workplace, but right-size your processes. So he actually did a time and motion study. And this is just in a typical PM service where he followed the technician around. This is a spaghetti diagram that shows the actual travel of the technician during a service. Steve was able to go in and right-size the processes, relocate some of the tools and equipment, change the PM checklist and put it in order for the technician, and was able to reduce waste, reduce time, and improve the operation. So you need to right-size the process as well. So workplace recap: make sure you right-size your workplace. Includes more than just your shop area. And how are we going to integrate this? We're running out of time, so I'm going to speed through this a little bit. Understand that each of these essential, essential elements are very important: workplace, workforce, and workload. However, don't look at them as silos. They are interrelated, and make sure that we balance these in order to create the most efficient fleet operation that we can. So future-proof your operation, build a unified rightsizing strategy that includes more than the number of vehicles. Consider growth. I don't know how many shops I've been in, they cut the ribbon and guess what? They've already outgrown the space. So consider growth, acknowledge that workload may be seasonal, and look at performance over a number of activities. So obviously it's going to help us improve efficiencies, reduce downtime, boost employee morale. And I think this says it best: the fleets that strive in the next decade will be the ones that right-size their fleets, their people, processes, and places. So before you go, one piece of homework over the next couple of weeks: take a look at your maintenance burden, identify your AEUs, calculate your direct labor hours required to maintain your fleet. Identify whether you have the right number of people in the right positions in the right shifts. Josh always talks about having— making sure that you have the right people on the right seat on the right bus. Do that. And then identify whether your facility is helping you succeed or holding you back. And if you do that, I guarantee you're Operation will be more efficient.

That—

I'm done. Thank you very much.

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