Maiden Voyage

My most recent fleet gig was managing the rolling stock of a regional natural gas utility. It had a history of being spun off, sold and absorbed by several owners in rapid succession before I showed up with my notepad and camera. Field management was gun-shy, and justifiably so. Fleet, when it existed at all, had been only a disembodied voice on the end of the phone. No face-time, no visits, no return calls and apparently no responsiveness. So when I first came onboard I was viewed with suspicion.

Many I met with were not only surprised I was out and about and meeting with them, but to a man they told how they had tried to get things done through prior management, but broken trucks stayed broken and mismatched equipment was never changed-out. Most of them had given up and took on the responsibility themselves. As a result, every supervisor had developed the habit of pigeon-holing trucks and equipment “just in case” a breakage occurred. Only half of the spares ran.

Change occurred as an evolution, not revolution. I developed programs to cull out the bad, update the old, maintain the existing, and eliminate the surplus equipment. When the inventory stabilized cash flow was significantly down and a 685 unit fleet was over 100 units lighter. But probably the biggest change the company folks noted was that when they spoke, someone listened. It was only after I’d heard “Thanks for listening” several times that I had an epiphany about the flaws of traditional/established fleet departments. They assume and presume. They rely only on known patterns, history and spreadsheets; they choose to not be proactive and they cause themselves a lot of harm though this choice.

Don’t misunderstand. When it comes to specific equipment lifecycle costing, past performance is still the best predictor of future success. Maintenance records, capital history and category spend all have their place as part of the fleet operations equation. But they are only part. Fleet management should be staying in front of evolving work and operational need, not simply reacting to it with tab-A-into-slot-A responses.  

I was lucky to a great degree. What I inherited was only fairly vague financials and a bad taste left in the collective workforce mouth.  I didn’t assume the baggage of systems already in place or prejudice against new processes.  I wasn’t battling “we’ve always done it that way”, so I had every opportunity and no choice other than to jump in with both feet and get something built.

And so to the point of this ramble. If you operate a fleet I would encourage you to keep historical information historical. It is information, not dogma. Your operators have needs and concerns that are constantly changing, so unless you can change with them, you become the quagmire they get stuck in. Fleet management offers enough challenge without making more along the way.

© 2014 D.W. Williams

Our Shiftless Society

I still remember the first time I watched it. It was approaching midnight on a late August evening, and I was a passenger on a two-birds-with-one-stone trip to Minnesota. I was onboard a very old Freightliner cab-over fleet-truck, sitting on a barely-there bench seat, hugging the doghouse. The Freightshaker had been made into a potato hauler by having the frame stretched and a self-unloading bed installed.

I don’t recall how many shifts I watched as we jolted along abandoned highway in North Dakota that cool night, but they were all double-clutched, smooth as glass and accompanied by the bellow of an 8V Detroit through a straight-pipe behind my right ear. He was a second cousin and had a hard lifestyle, but the man was an artist with that Roadranger. Now there are videos of the art-form on Youtube, so you can spare your back and your hearing if you want to learn about it.

Through high school and college we all played with cars. I honestly didn’t know anyone who couldn’t stir their own gears. The hotrodders among us still preferred a stick. The automatics were getting better and faster, but a sharp hand on the end of a Hurst T-handle could bang gears so fast you’d swear it was an automatic, and the sticks seemed quicker. That may have only been perception, but in, errr-ummm, street racing, perception is half the battle.

Into my Autocrossing days, stick shifts once again reigned supreme. On the track the stick allowed the car to respond instantly to your throttle foot. There was no lag; you thought it, and it happened. It helped the melding of man and machine. The stick-shift was also a must in the tow vehicle. While even then an automatic could fail less frequently than a clutch, a burnt clutch was a whole lot easier and cheaper to repair:   $125 and 3 hours under the truck in the driveway.

As I became seriously involved in business transportation, I started becoming aware of how few light-duty drivers really could grasp the stick-shift (pun fully intended). Not a formal survey by any stretch, but it seemed out of every 100 operators 20-30 could shift their own gears in a pinch, but of them only 15 seemed proficient enough that I would trust them daily with a stick.

In a light duty fleet, stick-shifts are anathema to dependability and trends are heading that way in heavy trucks. Every fleet manager understands the repair bills and downtime he is committing to if he deploys stick-shifts. I eventually saw the stick-shift drop off of our preferred manufacturer’s available options list about 2008-2009.

The domestic manufacturers toyed with continuously variable transmissions (CVTs) for a while, but the American buying public avoided them like the plague. Buyers couldn’t “feel” shifts like they had for years.

Today even pickups have a button on the gear-stalk that firms up the shifts and raises the shift-point. Manufacturers call this a “tow” setting, but as the same technology is turning up in cars as a performance setting, it sort of throws a bone to old-school hotrodders. These automatics have higher power-input ratings and more gears than they’ve ever had before. They are more efficient, longer lasting and offer better performance and economy than ever in history.

We joke in my neighborhood that you don’t need an alarm on a car with a stick. You can even leave the keys in it, because no one knows how to drive it anyway.

My son just bought his first car with his own money, using his own legwork. A 1991 Mazda Miata. It has a 5-speed stick.

© 2014 D.W. Williams