It’s about 2weeks to Christmas and 3weeks to the end of year 2013. For most businesses, guess it’s time to let down your hair, roll up your sleeves and get down to boogie hard in due celebration of another year of great feats. You have looked at your preliminary trial balance of accounts and the parameters are all looking up. You have compared this year’s performance against last year’s and it occurred to you that you have not done badly at all. True you may not necessarily be hitting the benchmarks you had set for the year, but then you can see greater improvements over the figures reported for the year before.

Report from the field tells you that your trucks are faring reasonably well. For a fleet that parades rigs that have ramped up 60,000-75,000 Kilometers in a year moving between 3900-5100 ton of consumables all across the federation over terrains that could barely pass for roads, you simply could not believe your luck that they are still looking this excellent. Feedback from your clients also recognizes the great contribution you have made to their supply chain and hoping strongly for a repeat performance or better in the New Year! HR’s feedback also tells you that you have witnessed very low turnover of drivers and key staff and that very few were found wanting in the course of the year. Surely, you tell yourself, things couldn’t be better under the prevailing socio-political cum economic situation of the country. It really doesn’t matter that you are still getting repeated alerts from your clients to make proper arrangements for trucks and drivers availability during the yuletide in order not to forestall loading and delivery operations -Haulage business is like a Rig Business- the rig never sleeps and so also haulage!

And so, you are probably at about now checking through the report submitted by an adhoc committee charged with making necessary and proper arrangement for a grand and befitting end-of-year party where everyone would probably have the fun of their lives!

For us in Haulage Report Now, we do appreciate the need to indulge once in a while and especially at a time like this knowing how much sweat and energy must have been dispensed by all to deliver an impressive year. However, for the business owner or General Manager or a highly empowered Fleet Manager, we also do believe that there couldn’t be a better time than now to take a more pragmatic look at some issues which we will be highlighting below:

 

Assets Health

This bothers on the performance and fit level of one of your most valuable assets – trucks. Although the outward physical appearance from what you can see seems okay but a more careful examination may reveal otherwise. Loading operations are generally light during the yuletide and thus present an opportunity to ground trucks for repairs and preventative assessment without the added burden of service failure or lost business.

That persistent funny sound you have been hoping will disappear with the passage of time- think it’s time you have it properly checked out.

That subtle but obvious depletion of the fuel conservation capability of the truck measured in terms of reducing kilometres per litre of fuel for same distance and same load capacity is clearly another aspect you may need to examine.

If you have a functional Maintenance Workshop, you may want to look up the global maintenance report for all assets. Issues that should particularly draw your interest are:

Frequency of servicing: Is it regular, just okay or tending towards abnormality? Your answer will probably affect your decision about where and how you get your servicing kit going forward. If you get your parts from the open market like Berger Suya or Auto spares market in Trade Fair, you may probably need to consider buying direct from local rep of OEM;

Parts replacement: Any suspiciously recurring parts?- then you need to know why and what was done throughout the year to stem the tide. It could be you have in error been buying a poorly done Reman for an original spares (see our article titled When Berger Suya Fails: Reman to the rescue for better explanation).

Rescue Operations: You probably had several brushes with the traffic and road safety officers during the year resulting in several service failures and huge financial setbacks. You may then wonder how responsive your maintenance team were. Any in-house corporate security adviser or Chief Security Officer with necessary links to the relevant enforcement agents? Any arrangement in place to facilitate swift response to emergency rescue situations? If you do not have yet, you may probably start looking at procuring a towing vehicle to augment your operations in the New Year. Every well-trained traffic management officer is aware of the fact that mechanical equipments can and do develop problems without any prior signals. It however becomes a major issue where the concerned haulage firm lack the requisite tools and manpower to immediately evacuate the troubled asset to prevent traffic gridlock. In the alternative, a number of firms exist that offer services that can effectively bridge this gap. You may need to start talking to one to avoid similar setbacks in the incoming year.

Tyre replacement: Still on asset maintenance, you may need to examine the expenditure profile for tyres and have report of tyre distribution per truck generated with a view to knowing which truck has taken the most tyres. Which brand was allocated to each truck and what average distances were covered by each truck. If you are on uniform brand-though rarely the case- for all categories of trucks, you may tweak this a little bit. If you have been on cheaper and affordable Chinese brand of tyres like infinity, boto, Sporttrack, grandstone e.t.c, you may want to consider a switch to a more expensive but higher quality brands from Japan and America like Yokohama, Goodyear, Firelli, Hankook, Bridgestone e.t.c. This is especially important for long haul trucks. The extreme heat and weather conditions in the far North may not be the best of friends for the cheaper and affordable brands. For short hauls and neighbourhood deliveries, you may probably be able to make do with the cheaper and affordable brands for a while.

 

Fuelling Concerns

How many rotors did you lose during the year? How many times did you have your fuel injector pump serviced or outrightly replaced? Did you lose any turbo charger or a number of them during the year? Affirmative answer to any of the above is a sure signal to take a second look at your fuelling quality and supply integrity. Equipping your fleet maintenance unit with appropriate toolkit for assessing fuel quality may be your next immediate expenditure if it’s not in place already. If you maintain your fuel dump, there may be need to reassess your choice of preferred supplier. If your client fuels your trucks, you may need to raise necessary alarm to attract appropriate attention to fuel quality; although chances are that you may have the option of managing your fuelling need by yourself thrown right back at you by the client.

 

Insurance

Your GIT (Goods-in-transit) and Comprehensive Insurance are probably expiring at year end. How responsive was your insurance company during the year? What about claims payment- how much of what you deserve to get were knocked off on the basis of some independent assessor’s re-computation and extant clauses? What was the response time to claim payment? How many accidents did you record during the year or maybe you had an accident-free year? Answers to all these questions should assist you in reassessing your insurance need and taking critical decision about your preferred service provider. You could also leverage on this to renegotiate the subsisting premium rate on your covers.

 

Tracking Services

What was the frequency of downtime in your tracking solution? How many trucks suddenly went ‘Dark’ during the year and what was the frequency like? What stop-gap solution did you receive during this downtime and how helpful were they? To what extent were the reports supportive in taking crucial decisions on scheduling, routing and trip management during the year? Were you getting the desired reports? How well does the tracking solution interact with your fleet management software? Or maybe you don’t even have a fleet management solution in place? These and many more will enable you decide on areas of tracking, reporting and compatibility (i.e. hand-shake) improvements you may demand from your service provider or at most spur you into taking far-reaching decision regarding your preferred fleet management and tracking solution’s vendor.

 

Routing Plans

So most of your trucks did long haul in the outgoing year? Good. But what was the turnaround time like? What feedback did you get matching repairs history for each truck against the choice of routes? Any repeated cases of misdemeanour or wrongful behaviour associated with any particular route? What is the popularity of the route among peers in the industry or how busy is the route? Aside the online report you may probably have gotten from your tracking software, you may need to enlist the services of a professional route surveillance company to give you a more comprehensive real-time live report for your most popular routes with a view to establishing route integrity, route safety for both truck and goods (rapidity of road wear is probably highest in Nigeria than any other country we know) and recommendations regarding opportunity for turnaround improvement.

……………………….Continued in Part Two.

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