At about this time of the year, every proactive trucker will naturally bother about the performance and fit level of one of the most valuable haulage assets – trucks. Although the outward physical appearance may seem okay, but a more careful examination may reveal otherwise. Loading operations are generally light during the yuletide and therefore 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 kilometers 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 trucks. 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 spare 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? Do you have any arrangement in place to facilitate swift response to emergencies as they occur? 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 equipment can and do develop problems without any warning. 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 and avoid unnecessary fines. In the alternative, if the cost of acquiring a new asset like a towing vehicle is way beyond your financial capacity for now, a number of firms exists that offer services that can effectively bridge this gap. You may consider entering into a low-cost equipment rental or vehicle rescue agreement with third party organizations that offers such services. You may need to start the negotiation now to avoid setbacks of this nature in the incoming year.

Tyre replacement: Still on asset assessment, you may need to examine the expenditure profile for tyres and peruse the report of tyre distribution per truck generated with a view to knowing which truck has taken the most tyres. The brand that was allocated to each truck and average distances covered by each truck are some of the variables you may want to check out. 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 Made-in-China brand of tyres like infinity, boto, Sporttrack, grandstone e.t.c, you may want to consider a switch to a more expensive but better quality brands from Japan and America like Yokohama, Goodyear, Firelli, Hankook, Bridgestone etc. This is especially important for long haul trucks. The parlous state of our roads coupled with the extreme heat and weather conditions in some part of the country 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.

Comments

comments