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Turn the tap to service compliance
Page 14
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Maintaining the roadworthiness of your trucks—and having comprehensive records to prove it—is at the very heart of the 0-licence system. From September, truck rental giant BRS will offer a simple, web-based system that allows operators to keep track of their truck servicing—and avoid a nasty letter from the Traffic Commissioner too. Brian Weatherley reports.
I Even the best-run fleets can fall into an ad-hoc pattern of vehicle servicing based on availability. And if you run several depots, keeping track of vehicles can become a real nightmare.
Once you've scheduled a truck for a service can you be sure it actually turned up at the workshop on the day it was supposed to? More important, can you prove it?
If you can't, then you could well receive a carefully-worded invitation to a Public Inquiry from your local TO who wants to know why you haven't complied with your original 0-licence undertaking on maintenance.
This week, rental giant BRS is launching a web-based service designed to help operators avoid that painful trip, and you don't have to be a BRS customer to use it.
The service—known as tap—is a commercial development of BRS's own internal computer-based vehicle service and maintenance tracking system, originally created to ensure maintenance compliance within its 0-licence.
"A lot of our customers run big fleets nationally and need service records and planning schedules in accordance with their 0-licence regs. We understand their problems as we're the only rental company with its own 0-licence which covers all our fleet," reckons BRS boss James Walker.
Having created that fleet servicing database, which is updated every time one of its vehicles is serviced by a dealer or service agent, a little over a year ago BRS decided to open it up to rental customers who wanted proof that their vehicle was covered by a proper service regime.
To check out a truck's service history, they simply visited the BRS website. "The upshot of that was we had good feedback from rental customers, and they starting asking about the possibility of having it for all their vehicles," says Walker.
Consequen*, BRS has now created the standalone tap system, again accessible via the Internet, and by anyone— regardless of whether or not they rent vehicles from BRS. It has already gained its first customers too. It can provide a plethora of vehicle information including:
• Vehicle service schedules flagging-up those that have missed a service:
• Road fund licence expiry dates; • Data on the servicing, the testing and certification of ancillary equipment such as fridges. taillifts and truckmounted forklifts; Tachograph calibration data and details on the next mandatory check: Any other service related Item you want to specify including tyres etc. "Highlighting a missed service on a truck because it's not at the right place at the right time, is a very useful 'key performance indicator' of your workshops or service provider" asserts Walker. "In effect, tap tells you your compliance performance."
To access the service information you first need to register with tap (see below). However, being web-based, operators don't have to purchase or load any bespoke software; you simply need an Internet connection.
Personalised pages Once you've dialled into the tap site, you then enter a user password—the opening screen can even display your own company logo. Next, after entering the vehicle's registration or ID number, you can then start 'drilling down' through the data pages in sequence. Up to 18 month's worth of historic data can be accessed at any one time— which should hopefully be sufficient to satisfy the men from VOSA.
A potential customer who has not been using BRS vehicles would need to supply records from their current vehicle service provider, and that data would have to be in the tap format. However. Walker says: "As MAN, Daf and lveco are part of our approved-supplier agreement they already enter vehicle service data to our parameters. We'll tell service providers how and when we want the data and from that we'll work out the next annual test, when the road fund licence is due etc."
If you do your own servicing, it's not a problem entering the information in the required fashion, says tap sales director Donald Sang. "It's a very easy format in [Microsoft] Excel—it's not difficult at all to submit to us. Operators can set up their own parameters within reason and get the information that matters to them."
Under the agreement BRS has with its existing vehicle maintenance providers, all records have to be submitted within 48 hours of the truck being serviced—either by fax or post— and tap will then display that data on its website no later than 48 hours after receipt.
The next phase, says Walker, is to use handheld data loggers within the workshops to input service information direct. "That way, the dealers become paperless. As a company we're always looking at how things can be improved."
To ensure that rental customers have comprehensive records from the word go, BRS will even give them the registration of a new truck prior to delivery—so they can start tracking it immediately.
Exception reports
One of the more attractive features of tap is that it will send exception reports to customers. So if a truck has missed a planned service, or is outside its agreed downtime parameters, then the operator is immediately alerted. And if the e-mail is sent to a head office, the fleet engineer can start asking questions of local depots.
"What we're able to do—as we already do it in BRS—is send an e-mail to wherever the nominated service point is to advise them that a vehicle needs a service and is booked in," confirms Walker. "We can then do a follow-up e-mail to ensure service was done—the boss man wants that! With an operator who has multiple sites, the advantage is that the central depot has access to central reports. All defects are reported and available for viewing," he says.
"It's not complicated," says Walker, "because it's been taken from a proven internal system, yet no two customers will get the same report as different types of customers have different equipment. So tap offers real advantages to muttiple fleets. Our core competence is vehicle maintenance—tap will make life easy."
Having invested around Elm in development, BRS isn't offering tap for nothing. Sang says operators will pay between 23-5 per week per vehicle—on atypical 10-truck fleet that will work out to around 1125-135 a year per truck, which sounds a costeffective investment for insuring fleet compliance.
Having started with service info, tap also has the potential to become a gateway to all kinds of fleet data, including telematics via the Dynafleet equipment fitted on BRS rental vehicles. "Which means a low-cost entry into the world of telematics," reports Walker. "Cars, light CVs, plant, PS Vs—it has the potential to provide service data on all these pieces of equipment."
• Contact tap on OM 1298423.