Episode 219: Stop Guessing at Downtime: Status Strategy for Better Availability #podcast #fleet

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I am Mark Canton, your host today, VP of Product and Consulting here at RTA Fleet. The Fleet Success Company. And I am joined by my good friend and colleague, Andrew French. Andrew, how you doing, bud?

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on today.

Oh, I'm super pumped to have you on. So Andrew is one of our fleet management analysts. Folks who listen to the show regularly have heard me brag about him and his compadres. I think we have, if not a monopoly, an oligarchy on the best fleet management analyst talent in the business. I am not ashamed to say it. And Andrew is certainly one of the folks who make that true. Andrew, tell us a little bit about it. How did you fall into Fleet, my friend?

I think using the term fall is pretty accurate because isn't that how we all get here? Yeah, right.

That's what it feels like.

It's kind of funny. I can say that my Fleet journey started by a lot of easy apply clicks for jobs that I was looking for. So if that doesn't tell you I fell into it, then I don't know what does.

That's funny. So you were just like, give me a job, any job.

So, yeah, just kind of a funny story because Chuck Kramer was the one who hired me, who also works for RTA and has, I think, been on the show a few times.

Chuck's one of our consultants and he's a multi-time winner of various fleet awards associated with 100 Best Fleets and Government Fleet Magazine. Go ahead, Andrew.

So anyway, when I was, you know, he ended up reaching out to me and you know, all of a sudden, you know, you started asking me these like fleet questions and data analyst questions. So I immediately had to get right on Google and start, start making myself not look like an idiot. So, no, but all joking aside, you know, as I was brought on and it was my first experience in fleet and really for data analytics as a whole, I did a little bit at a previous previous stops, and this was really an opportunity to really learn from the ground up. And I was given the opportunity to really in the first month or two of working, just given, you know, hands open, say, hey, learn fleet and learn analytics and do the best you can. And so, you know, I was given every opportunity to succeed and to learn. I started out with the the NAFA courses and starting out with learning the CAE/FM, which, man, which really got me up to speed fairly quickly and networking with some of other professionals at a lot of the, a lot of the different conferences and networking events that go on. I mean, there's, there's no reason to not succeed in this industry. Everybody's helpful and so many resources out there. And, you know, this is about 5 years after that and I still feel like I, uh, still feel like I'm just treading water, you know. There's so much.

Yeah, yeah, you're a humble dude. You're a humble dude. So if you said this and I missed it, forgive it, but you and Chuck were together at the City of Lynchburg, right? Virginia?

Yeah.

Okay, all right, great. So here's why I wanted to have you on today. Thank you for, uh, you know, kind of, um, coming on with me here, because you have— you recently kind of came up with something. I think you're gonna be speaking on it soon too, right? I'm not— if I'm not mistaken, or, or Or is it you did a write-up or a blog on this? But, um, we'll answer that here in a second. But, um, it's like, it's hard to explain, but it's something that like I think I've known intuitively and, and maybe others do too. And yet you've kind of come at it from an angle that I think is really gold and a cool perspective. And it's about the importance of, of utilizing statuses as a feature within your FMIS and sort of why it's so important, how it's so important, and all the gains and that sort of a thing. So, um, at a high level, is that accurate? Is that, you know, where did you go? What are you doing with— how did this come up? And then, or did you do a write-up on it or something like that, and now you're going to speak to it? Talk to me here. What's the plan? How are we going to bring this to the world?

Honestly, this was the one of the first things. So it's— I'd say statuses, both vehicle and work order, are near and dear to my heart, which is probably the most Fleet Geek thing I've said all week. So, um, I love—

we're gonna make you your own shirt. I love asset status.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll expect to see that in the mail this coming week.

So, all right, so let's start there though. Like, what are asset statuses? And knowing the status of that, you know, first off, let's explain what we mean by an asset status, right? And then explain why that's so important and why, you know, Well, go ahead. Why that's so important and then why— what you think people are kind of maybe not getting right or not leveraging in their software properly.

Right. So we talk all the time on this, on the show and really internally. This is not just a show thing. It's that availability is one of the top, if not the top status or the— sorry, status, if not the top metric that you can be tracking with within your fleet. And so I would say is, as just kind of thinking through that, while you sit down at your desk and say, I'm going to improve my fleet's availability today, well, where do you start? And so I think asset statuses and work order statuses are exactly where you start, because if you don't know exactly what's tracking availability or if you can't even define yourself what is availability, then you're never going to get there. And so these vehicle statuses, when you define when a vehicle is available or not available, can't be anything else. It's one or the other. And same thing with, with your work order statuses. If it's, if it's in the shop, can the customer come get it? Is it available for the customer to use or is it not? And so you have to really work through all these things to even get to the bottom of— honestly, I think it's the next rung down from figuring out your availability percentage. I think it's one of the best tools you can use.

Right. Yeah. And so, and so what you— well, first off, let's, let's explain the difference. What do we— when— because you and I agree, I think, and I think that not every system and not only that, not every fleet manager differentiates between asset status and work order status. So let's take a quick pause there and explain what we mean. Why are those different? What are the difference between those two?

I think there is a little bit of a hierarchy here because work order status should give insight into whether or not the vehicle's available, whereas the vehicle status actually should tell you where it's at and should be having availability connected to it. For example, let's just use a very generalized status for vehicle status of active, or is it available, or something like that, that the vehicle is able to be used. They can be used, is, you know, whether or not is it being used is a different question, but can it be used is really what we're trying to solve for here. And so when a, you know, when a vehicle is being used and it's on the road and it's fulfilling what you got it for, then great, everything's all good. But now what is the big times where it wouldn't be available? Well, when it's at your shop or it's at a different shop. So then you need to break that down a little bit further to know what's, what's going on in the shop and is it available to be used? So, you know, if it's— and that's— so you're really just tracking the status of the vehicle's availability as it's in your shop. Now, it might seem obvious that's like, well, if it's at the shop, then it must be unavailable. Well, maybe, not always. And so that's where, and so there's times where it actually is available, but it might still be in your parking lot. Well, how are you going to differentiate that? Because if you make a call for somebody to come, for a customer to come pick up the vehicle and they take 5 days to get it, well, is that, you know, is that unavailable?

That's not the shop's fault.

Yeah, that's not the shop's fault. But if you're kind of lumping everything into, if it's in the shop, then it's, or, you know, we have an open, work order status, then it's unavailable. You're doing yourself a disservice in that case, right?

I like to think of it— I'll get your take on this— I like to think of it in terms of, like, in our paradigm that we try to teach folks or try to encourage folks to use, is thinking in terms of metrics, in terms of the objective that you're, uh, that, that you're aiming for, uh, and what that metric is measuring your success towards that objective, right? So I know that sounds wishy-washy, you know, but what that means is, right, like, for asset status, What are we trying to do? We're trying to measure what the availability or lack thereof of that asset is, right? And so within asset status, what do I need to know when it's not available, right? I need to know that it's available. And if it, if it's not available, what data do I want to capture to have better insight into why it's not available? And so one of those things might be, oh, it's out for repair. Let's just say it's out for repair. Okay, that's an asset status. If it's in a shop, you know, and we talk about a work order status, the objective there is to understand, you know, the progress of that work order. And if that work order is being blocked or slowed for any reason, having data that allows you to have insight into what are the slow points, what are the blocking points, right? So from an asset perspective, all I need to know it's in the shop. Hey, if I have a low— why is my availability so low? Well, look at this. Look at the amount of time my status is in the shop or out for repair or whatever, however you may call it. And then you have a lot of insight. Hey guys, we have low availability and here's the reason. Vehicles are spending way too much time in the shop. Okay, now I go deeper and I say, well, what's the holdup in the shop? Well, in the shop it could be it's waiting on a bay, which means there's this big backlog of vehicles parked outside and they just can't get it in. Could be it's waiting on a tech. Well, maybe we have a tech shortage and we just can't get somebody to work on it quickly enough. It could be waiting on a part. Well, is there parts behind? Are we not inventorying parts properly? Is this a very rare part? Is it a part we should have but we let go out of stock? Or, you know, and to your point about parts, parts is interesting because you could have, hey, waiting on a part unavailable, right? Because we ain't going out without brakes. It could be waiting on a part. You know, we are available. Need new light bulb for rear dome light, right? Like, you're not keeping that thing out of use for that, right? So to continue though, what's the insight that I'm driving on the work order status? We want to understand, you know, where do we have an opportunity to improve our efficiency and to optimize our processes to make these work orders flow as quickly as they reasonably can? On the asset side, we want to understand, you know, what are the various reasons, what are the things that are costing me time in terms of not allowing my operators— it could be, hey, it could be shipping the vehicle cross-country. You know, got a big corporation, vehicle in transit, vehicle in transit, who knows what it is. But the idea is, what is the insight that you're trying, you know, to drive at sort of a thing? And I think it's important to keep those separate for those reasons. I know a lot of people kind of mince them up, and I think it leads to, um, it conflates issues, I think, at times. So, I mean, what are your thoughts? Is that a, is that a fairly reasonable, uh, you know, does that jive with what you're thinking here as far as how to, how to think about these two?

Oh yeah, for sure. And, uh, I think you hit on it perfectly. Like, you know, we're If you're running at near perfect availability, then all of this doesn't matter. It really doesn't. But the fact is, everybody can be doing better. And so, I mean, these are identifying these pain points, 'cause it's not just the sake of tracking these things just to track them, which unfortunately I do feel like is an easy trap to fall into. But you're tracking them to identify specifically why your availability isn't where it should be. And so, you know, you don't have these statuses just, you know, just to make things complicated, but, and also it's for tailoring it to your specific shop. Not everybody's going to use the same statuses. Not everybody has the same workflow that you may have. So it really takes the team effort to Talk about it, to talk through it. What are your processes? And I think a lot of the time, one of the first things that, events that stands out in my mind in fleet is when we were first filling out the first NAFSA Top 100 application. And I realize this is coming out at a time because it's, you know, I think the application's closing today.

Is that right? Today? I know it's always the end of January. I didn't realize it was today.

Yeah.

We're giving away, our marketers are going to kick our butt. We're giving away when we recorded this.

There you go. So I can just say, it's like, I don't know, it's closing sometime soon. Okay. But so when we were first filling it out, one of the first metric that they suggest you fill out is availability. So very in line with what we also preach. So what we did is, and as we were talking about it, it's not just providing the metrics with these top 100 applications, it's giving the context. Why? Why is your fleet availability 98% or why is it, you know, 68%? And so why is that? So as we were filling that out, we realized that we couldn't really answer the question of why. Why was our availability the way it was? So we dug into it and I came up with just a standard list. I think we used the VMRS list that they just has for just to influence. And to give some inspiration into it. And what we did is we sat down as a team at Fleet, everybody within there, and we, for probably a few hours, we hashed out exactly the statuses that we need, why we needed them. And we ended up cutting out a lot of statuses that we had in our system because they weren't telling us what we needed to know. But what we did end up doing is we ended up getting a whole new list of things that, hey, this is exactly this. If we know when our vehicle is in this status, then we can easily link it to there's some problems that we're having with A, B, and C workflows or, or personnel or just general issues that we have. And so it was even just that going through the process of filling out the application for the top 100 was a great team effort. And a real actually good team building exercise because we got everybody's input to feed into it. So not only did we fix our, you know, fix our statuses at that point and we had a base of how to track this, but we were moving together as a team and as a, as a one, one unit to actually know, hey, how are we doing with availability? And we knew exactly where we were going and how we wanted to get there. So it was just a great experience all around to talk through it. And, you know, all jokes aside, I say it's near and dear to my heart because there's actually some really good, you know, really good memories in my head associated with that and improving as a fleet because we did the work in figuring out those statuses. So that's why I think there's so much importance there.

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Yeah, so let's dig into that a little bit because I think there's some lessons to be learned there. So, so one is, again, and this, this mirror is sort of, you know, having a data management plan. So the number one is, well, what's important to you? What do you need to know? And that will often dictate, you know, what statuses you, you need to have and what, you know, what you need to be tracking. You don't need things in there if they don't really matter. You don't need that differentiation per se, right? Like, what do you actually need to know? So getting clarity around that, especially as a team like you described, is super important because then we all know what we're working towards, right? And again, you see a lot of this too with our customers, like in the background when you're helping them with their reporting. Or you're doing analytics or they need, you know, it's like sometimes they come to you, I need a report that tells me this. And you look at them and, you know, for being honest, it's like, well, I'm happy to give you that, but you're not configured. You didn't set your statuses up the right way. So it's not going to tell you what, you know, what you need it to know. So it's important to understand that everyone wants data, data, data. And I agree with that. But if you're not managing the input of the data properly, you're not going to get anything good out of it. People know that they talk about garbage in, garbage out all the time, but I don't know how well it's actually understood how important your configuration is to, and to ensuring that you're getting the data you want. So, so step one is get really clear on what are our processes and what are the things where we need to know or we want to learn about ourselves. And that will often be a really good indicator as to what statuses you need to create in your system and when to apply them. So that's one tip I heard you say. Um, I'm gonna put words in your mouth here, maybe, but I think you'll agree, is another thing that I think we see a lot is, um, like overlapping statuses, right? Where you have two different things that— two different statuses that could mean something the same or similar, or, or they cross over, right? You could be in either status at the same time. That really hurts your situation. That's one of the reasons we separated. A lot of systems, they just have status. and we separated asset status from work order status quite intentionally for that reason to create that, you know, that differentiation. Is that something you're seeing a lot too where people will kind of, there'll be like confusion about which status to use?

Yeah, because absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah, no, no, no, please.

No, if you have a, if you have an example or jump in here, you know, I think that's where it gets a little bit tricky because, um, you know, there's that thought if If something is— if there's going to be— if there's the opportunity for bad data to be put in, it's going to happen. And I think, you know, as you said, having those overlapping statuses is really going to hurt you because, you know, that means if you have overlapping statuses, that means even from the top level, you're not providing clarity. There's not an expectation of what something is supposed to accomplish. And even just going back to the work that we put in as a team to decide what these statuses are going to be, we walk through that. Are any of these redundant? And so actually we did kind of come to that as we were saying the part status was a good one, but we need a parts usable or parts not usable or waiting on parts usable and not usable because that makes a difference. And we just had it lumped into one category. They're like, wait a second, that's not fair. And so even, even by just kind of breaking that out, I know that's, you know, along the same lines. Yeah. And so I think ultimately it's that if your statuses aren't clear, you're not being clear about what's being expected of your fleet. And that's a huge— it's going to hurt.

And the other thing with it too is it's one of the few ways where you can measure You know, our system provides more than one where I'm very proud of that, but it's one of the fewer ways that you can measure performance sort of outside of your shop, right? Like it's a great way to measure vendor performance. It's a great way to measure customer performance, right? You know, uh, those sorts of things like, hey, you know, the feedback I've gotten is it takes forever to get things out of the shop. So you know what, we're going to start tracking waiting for pickup, right? Maybe, right? And now we know, oh, look, look how much time these assets have lost to waiting for one of your folks to come get them. You guys tell me what you want to do. Either you got to figure out a way to come get them, or should we hire someone? You want us to hire a runner? You're going to help fund the runner? We'll charge you for the runner, we'll deliver them to you, right? But having them sit at the shop when they're done, that doesn't help anybody, and it's hurting our organization's bottom line, right? Uh, so again, you know, what are we looking to solve for? You know, you're— there's so many fleet managers out there today trying to argue that they need another tech or that they need a better facility, and yet they're not recording any data. It's, it's they're trying to prove something without any data to back it. Well, start recording. This is how long we wait because we don't have enough bays, or how often we send something out because we don't have a bay that fits, or etc., etc. All of that could be tracked and recorded. If you're waiting for a tech— waiting for a tech, you know— all of that could be tracked and recorded, and then you can have hard data around what that actually looks like. And it really helps you solve a lot of problems. It really helps you get more efficient, helps you tell your story with data and, you know, give context to that other, to that information. Otherwise you, you're just complaining. You're not really, uh, making a, a coherent argument for, you know, for leadership who speak in terms of numbers, right? Which we've talked about before, right? For being honest. So, uh, that's, that's really neat. Um, so when's the right time to get like, you know, so, so some takeaways here are one, get it right. Know what you need to, what you're looking for. If you're having problem areas, that might indicate that, hey, maybe we need to change statuses and, and record better. What are some of the things you think you've learned or that you might recommend to our listeners? You know, tips, trips, you know, when should you review these? Uh, you know, that sort of a thing. What do you got? You know, what mistakes maybe that you see people make often? You know, give us some, some of the insights you've gained by working with this stuff so closely over the last few years.

Yeah. So I think the first big one is and this, this really is applicable to anything. So this is kind of cheating in a way, is you really need your fleet team to buy in. And I— and it comes back to that clarity of people who are your service writer, your, you know, your fleet manager, whoever is working with this should know why we do what we do. Your technicians, should know why we do what they do. And I'll tell you what, when there was a huge part of when we started bringing in our technicians to know why we were doing stuff in the system. And there's this stigma, right? The technicians are, when you start talking about time and tracking things, they think it's, they think you're talking about them and that they're not doing a good job. Well, when we started actually bringing them in and explaining, hey, this is why we're doing this, you know, you want extra help, you want a bigger facility, you want more tools, you want all of these things. This is where it starts. And so when we started showing them these numbers and saying that, hey, we're not trying to police you, we're not trying to be Big Brother here, we're trying to help you, you know, help me help you. Right. You know, from the Jerry Maguire.

That's a great call. Yeah.

And so once we brought that in, all of a sudden we had our technicians that were thinking like fleet managers. And so we actually would have technicians coming like, hey, I have an idea of how this can— how we can move this along better. And that's only because we let them in. They were a part of it. We gave them ownership to the process. And so that's what I think is, is you need fleet buy-in into this and not just one a data analyst sitting in an office saying, hey, you know, we need these 10 statuses and this is how they're going to work. I mean, certainly that might be the start of the conversation, but it can't be the end.

You just became every technician in the English-speaking world's favorite fleet management analyst.

I'll fight for them. I'll fight for you guys. I've seen it. I've seen it.

All right. So that's a really good example. So we need buy-in. Get the input of the team. They're gonna see things that maybe you don't, and they're gonna give you some insight there. Okay. That, that, that's huge. That's a big one. What else do you see? Again, tips, tricks, mistakes people make, you know, et cetera.

I think there's also with every status, there's a work, there's a workflow process to it. And I guarantee you, and I, and again, I'm gonna keep saying clarity because that's ultimately what we're trying to solve for here, right? We are trying to solve for clarity. We're trying to gain understanding. With every one of these statuses, again, it's not just the status, but there's a workflow that's embedded into it. For example, we had in the beginning when we first started is that whenever we put an asset in the system, it just went into active. It started tracking availability right away. I bet you can see what the problem with that is.

[Speaker] Yeah, right away everyone listening is like, wait a minute.

[Speaker] Yeah. Well, also, I mean, even during the time of COVID you know, we got in a vehicle and it sat for months on end because, right, you couldn't get outfits, you couldn't get the service. So all of a sudden we had a vehicle that was perfectly able. We had an old vehicle that it was, that was just dying to get replaced. You know, that's also is in the shop all the time because it's old and it should have been replaced. And so, you know, the in-servicing, it caused us to take a look at who's doing the in-servicing, what's the process that we need to go through here? Do we need to meet, you know, do we need to make sure that things are getting upfitted and in-serviced even before they came in? So by even just deciding, hey, we're going to do an in-service status that's not going to be tracking avail— you know, that I guess you can make the argument, should it track availability, should it not? And that depends on, you know, was a vehicle turned in at the time that it came in, then maybe it should be. But.

Right.

So all the decisions there that there's a workflow that happens with each of that. And so every one of these status, multiple people are involved to making this a more, you know, more efficient run, just organization. So just be, I guess the takeaway, as you're saying, is This is not just a, hey, we'll, we'll put this into whatever fleet management software you use and then we will forget about it. There's follow-up work that's going to be— have to be done with every single one of these things. And you have to be open and honest and say, hey, this may, may not be the best thing to do, but at least it'll get us closer to start tracking what we need to.

And I think I heard in there too, like, you need to be thoughtful and intentional. Right? Like, you know, why am I creating this status? So that's a great point, right? You make a great point. I would argue most people, the way they use their FMIS, the minute the darn thing arrives, it's in, it's active, it's in service. And it's like, wait a minute, no, you got, you know, do you need to upfit it? Are you putting lights on it? Are you putting stickers on it? You know, it should have status that kind of lead into it before it gets, you know, purely active, right? Um, available— again, that available for pickup, because you might call it active now and they don't come get it. When does it really become active, right? Um, you're right, and you got to think of your flow, because, um, in theory, one could argue, um, it's active as soon as it gets there. And if you're willing to let that thing walk because you're so desperate, well then great. But if your policies are, no, no, no, it doesn't go any place until it gets that DOT sticker, which it should, um, you know, you probably don't want to call it available there. So That's a great point. You know, people don't pause and kind of think through, uh, you know, their, their own workflows. So I think that's another sort of side takeaway too. Like, when's the last time you did a process review and re-engineered your processes? I mean, that's something you should be doing every few years as well. Uh, but that's a good point. Yeah. So what— so is it safe to say, like, like, what do you see as far as, hey, when folks get this right and they take the time to really set up their statuses and then also use them right, what is the benefit that they get? And then vice versa, like, what— vice versa, what is the— what are the problems that you see, or what are the character traits that fairly describe those, those fleets, right? Like, compare the— hey, when I get it right, this— it looks like this, and when I get it wrong, it looks like that sort of a thing.

You know, it's— it is interesting that you say that because I can't necessarily say that there's a that there's a definitive way that it looks right, because you might be actually doing better in tracking your fleet, but your numbers may be far worse. And that's okay. That's okay. Because you can't— unless you are actually tracking accurately, kind of like you said, the garbage in, garbage out, then you don't know what's going on. You might have great numbers, but if they're not accurate, then what is it really doing? So I think I'd like to say that it's hard to know exactly what success is in this because availability is one of those numbers that like if it's just a number, it's— but what it is, is it's describing your fleet. And so I think, I think probably the best thing that you could do to define that is, is really whatever data that you have kind of do a before and after. Right, this is what it looked like before and this is what it looked like after. And if you have to do direct comparisons like, okay, before— I don't know, I'm going to throw out a number of the year before January 1st, you know, before we use these statuses, this is roughly the time over the past year or past 2 years, the average time that each vehicle was spending in the status. I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there. But then after you can compare the apples to apples, it's like, oh wow, we're spending— we're having way more time now that's being put in that vehicles are waiting for a bay than we were before. Maybe because it's because you didn't have a waiting for a bay status, or maybe it's because, you know, you just weren't really doing it. Maybe the workflow wasn't there. Maybe the technicians were unclear. You know, they may have just been putting in waiting for technicians. So all of a sudden they were getting negatively affected. When they weren't putting it in there. So again, there's— this is one of those things that it's hard to come away with a yes, this is what happens when you're doing it good or when you're doing it bad. But the important thing is to start doing it and you just have to really just chisel it out from there. And you might have more insight into that. But that's my, that's my thought on that topic.

I think insight's the key word, right? Like, I think when you're doing it right, you know, you know, Facundo talks a lot about, um, elevator pitches, right? And, you know, whatever you think of his philosophy and approach there, the, the element about it that I love is knowing your fleet, like really knowing your program inside and out, right? And so I think that by executing on this properly, I think it gives you insight to understand, hey, this is what we do well, this is what we're struggling at, and therefore what we need to be working on, right? And hopefully you've gone one step deeper and done some root cause and understand, and this is why we're struggling at it, right? So, um, you know, if your turn times on your vendor sublet, you know, you're going to know that if you're doing this right, and you're going to know, hey, when it's time for contract renewal, We need to get, we need to get some KPIs into the SLA and into the contract that don't currently exist. Um, right. So you, so you have insight into what you're doing well and what you're doing poorly. And if you've taken that next step, you know exactly what you're gonna do to fix it when you get the opportunity to fix it. Or if you already have the opportunity, how are you fixing it now? And at any time you're prepared, right? You can explain that to leadership. You can explain that to the team. Um, you know, in the end it's, it's about executing and about your action, but it's hard to take action without insight, without information. You know, they say it all the time, knowledge is power. If you don't have this right, you don't really know, you don't have a clue, right? And don't, don't get me wrong, yes, available or not starts there. But if it's, if the answer is not, you really need to know why not. Otherwise you can't fix it and get the answer to be yes, available. So, um, the folks who get this right, I think they tend to have really high availability rates, and I think they tend to be much more efficient. And, and even if they're not there yet, they know, they know why, and they, and they're working towards it, right? And they have a really good answer to your point about 100 Best Leads. They got a really good answer as to why their availability is what— excuse me— or why these other metrics are what they are. And they can explain to the judges, hey, this is where we were and this is what we're moving towards. So I think that's super important. I think, I think these status, man, I think they're an underrated and key piece of really any decent FMIS system, certainly of ours. Every time I get on a call with a customer who's looking for help with some things, I find that the conversation leads back to statuses, even if that's not what they intended to talk to me about in the beginning. There's just so much insight to be drawn from getting that right. And I think you've keyed in on that for us, right? You've emphasized that, you know, for the teams in here at RTA. So kudos to you for kind of having that insight and picking up on that. A major tool. It's a super important tool. If it's one you're not using today, stop, get on the horn with your CSM and your FSM or whoever helps you, your account manager, and say, hey, how do I, how do I get using this and using this properly today? And we have many customers who we've helped, and, you know, they'll call us saying, I need a report that does this, or I need that, you know. And by the end of the conversation, it's, hey, all right, let's set up your statuses properly and get you guys using it. So All right, with that, my friend, I want to thank you so much for all the time you've spent with me. I think this is really neat and really cool. And, uh, yeah, I can't wait to have you on again soon.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This is awesome.

All right, brother, take care. All right, everyone, if I have any questions and, uh, you know, topic ideas or more questions or you want to hear more from Andrew, uh, go ahead and email us at podcast@rtafleet.com or visit our website at www.

Rtafleet.com.

And with that, have a wonderful day, everyone. Take care.

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