february2022 - 6

HI TCHED UP FROM THE EDITOR
Planning for the
shop of the future
Managing a successful shop takes a great amount
of planning. AI can help, but not without people skills.
By John Hitch
Editor
@Hitched2Trucks
As I get more entrenched in managerial
duties, I'm starting to realize there's more to
planning than I previously thought. For example,
do you know you have to plan time to even
be able to plan? This probably comes naturally
to all those perfectly organized enigmas who
use color-coded binders and always know what
day of the week it is. But for those of us who
skew reactionary, people who attack problems
as they come, planning ain't easy.
Being proactive, though, is necessary for
any manager, whether they edit a magazine
or run a busy commercial vehicle repair shop.
And this is likely more difficult-and important-for
shop managers, as an editor's job has
always been: write, read, edit, repeat. In a
modern service facility, the job and tools are
always changing, getting more advanced, more
technical. Simple body work now includes recalibrating
the ADAS cameras. A routine tire
changeout might also now include installing
and programming tire pressure monitoring
system sensors as well. And if you think
diagnosing electrical issues is a pain point
now, wait until electric vehicles need service.
Understanding those complexities takes a lot
of training and a lot of planning.
You might think it's easier to ignore all the
newfangled tech and focus on the job at hand,
but when all of these components become
universally adopted and your team isn't
prepared, you might have to plan for a change
of employment.
Now disaster planning is an area I am well
versed in. Back in my old submarine days, that's
all we did. Nearly every day at sea, we'd pretend
the reactor was melting down, or another sub
was shooting a torpedo at us, or both at the
same time. I used to think it was an exercise
in sadism on the part of the officers, but now I
realize it was so we'd have the muscle memory
to handle business if something like that did
go down. Shops also need to excel at disaster
planning, like when when a barrel of engine oil
spills over (we lay out how to do that on Pg. 8).
That piece coincidentally reminds me that you
can't plan for everything, like when a lube pump
erupted hydraulic fluid all over the engine room
once, shortly after diving. A few handpicked
off-watch sailors including myself spent six
hours sopping up the viscous mess with chem
wipes, the Navy's reinforced version of paper
towels. I would've loved to have an actual spill
kit, or at least a shop vac. Having the right tools
6 Fleet Maintenance | February 2022
» On the road to automated maintenance.
Image: 840891968 | gremlin | Getty Images
to make jobs easier is far more important for
shops than subs, because diesel technicians can
leave the job without fear of the bends or sharks.
For shop managers, the technician shortage
might actually be a more fearsome threat.
Will that newly onboarded tech stick around,
or will they depart for an easier job? Hobby
Lobby recently raised its starting pay to $18.50
for full-time employees. The median pay for a
diesel technician is a little over a dollar more,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Fleets and shops are starting to plan for the
future via outreach programs at high schools
and community colleges. That's a great start,
but probably futile if you're not stocking the
right tools to make PMs and repairs more efficient.
These workers value fixing problems as
best as possible, not just a paycheck.
We recently profiled a Dickinson Fleet
Services technician named Josh Lawhorn, who
said, " As much as I hate wasting a customer's
money, I really hate wasting their time. " Plan
accordingly to keep folks like this.
Predictive maintenance might just be the
digital tool to ensure smooth operations. Just
as diagnostics tell you what's wrong now, prognostics
use historical data and algorithms to
forecast what could go wrong. This allows shops
to get ahead of catastrophic failures. Pitstop's
maintenance platform cut downtime by an
average of 20% annually, time that can now
be spent training on all that new technology.
Noregon's remote diagnostics tool TripVision
Uptime is another good example, and will be a
big part of the company's future strategy. Scott
Bolt, Noregon VP of product management (and
" The future is going to
be prescriptive in nature,
where you can prescribe
a certain business
outcome. That is where
the real value lies. "
Sandeep Kar, Chief Strategy
Officer, Noregon
fellow sub vet), explained that while the industry
is now in a " fix-it-because-it's-broke phase, "
Noregon's roadmap calls for predicting breakdowns
and fixing them so they don't break.
Sandeep Kar, Noregon's newly appointed
chief strategy officer, teased that even this
isn't the endgame: " The future is going to be
prescriptive in nature, where you can prescribe
a certain business outcome. That is where the
real value lies.
" Through effective analysis of vehicle
operation and service/maintenance data, "
Kar continued, " optimal RPM ranges can
be prescribed to fleets for delivering higher
powertrain efficiency and safety, as well as
lower TCO and environmental footprint. "
That's a lot, and might even tempt some fleets
to downgrade the role of the shop manager.
To avoid obsolescence, maybe the plan should
be to show where your real value lies: that's
likely more in predicting what your employees
and customers want and need, not what some
machine wants.
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february2022

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