The Critical Importance of Service and Repair Triage

How often does your truck sit at a service provider’s location for days (even weeks) only for you to find out that it could have been fixed in less than two hours? This issue impacts fleets as well as service providers.

According to recent discussions at Decisiv’s annual Maintenance Summit, both fleets and their service providers can benefit significantly from prompt service and repair triage. While some providers may feel too busy to perform triage on assets as soon as they arrive, ignoring this process decreases uptime and negatively impacts relationships with fleets. Prompt triage may even drive increased revenue and efficiency for the providers themselves.

Discover why triage is so beneficial to fleets and how service providers can gain a competitive edge by performing prompt repair triage on assets.

How Repair Triage Benefits Fleets

When fleet assets go in for repairs, everyone from fleet managers to dispatch to operations needs to know when those assets will be ready to get back on the road. This critical information impacts planning cycles, drivers’ hours-of-service availability and dispatch operations as well as the possible need for rentals and safety stock or even other re-power options. Without a clear estimated time of repair (ETR), fleets are forced to make decisions with limited or no facts.

When service providers take the time and appropriate resources to quickly triage an asset, they’re able to at least let fleets know if the repair is going to take two hours, two days or even two weeks. With more accurate ETRs, fleets can make better decisions and properly factor assets into planning cycles.

Additionally, when an expert technician performs triage, it’s likely that technician could uncover additional issues with the asset. This may help the fleet avoid additional, more costly repairs and breakdowns.

How Providers Benefit from Prompt Service and Repair Triage

With a consistently executed, prompt triage process, service providers can better serve their fleet customers. In fact, at the recent Decisiv Maintenance Summit, service providers that performed upfront triage on a regular basis reported higher customer satisfaction scores. Plus, the fleets at the Summit said they’re more likely to go to a shop that performs prompt triage because they felt that in many cases this would get their vehicles back on the road faster.

Additionally, shops that perform upfront triage also reported faster throughput. This was associated with the ability to quickly fix those items that could be fixed immediately (2-4 hours) and because providers had a clearer picture of the tasks in front of them, improving their shop and technician resource planning as well as parts availability.

Leveraging SRM to Support Service and Repair Triage

While there’s no substitute for an experienced technician performing triage on an asset that comes in for repair, tools such as a Service Relationship Management (SRM) platform help improve and streamline the process.

An SRM platform boosts service and repair triage by:

• Capturing the right information up front

• Sending status updates to fleets

• Streamlining estimates and approvals

• Sending inspection information with pictures to fleets

• Capturing diagnostic information from telematics and shop tools

• Using electronic inspection forms to capture identified failures and automating the selection of the most appropriate service operations

By leveraging the platform’s capacity for improved communication and information capture and retrieval, fleets and providers can streamline both triage and the post-triage repair process.

Fleet Managers and Service Providers, Share Your Feedback

Are your dealers and service provides promptly and consistently triaging your trucks immediately upon their arrival? Have you noticed any measurable increases in uptime? What other practices do your top providers use to ensure more consistency and accurate ETRs?

Please share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

Michael Riemer is the Vice President of Products and Channel Marketing for Decisiv and a recognized commercial fleet industry thought leader. Michael has authored dozens of articles covering fleet maintenance, regulatory compliance, utilization and availability. He is also a frequently requested speaker and commentator in online and print interviews.

If you have the desire to learn more about what a Service Relationship Management Platform can do for you, check out our blog.