Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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24 commercial carrier journal | january 2017 Mack, Volvo use Certified Uptime Centers to slash downtime B arely a year after launch, Volvo Group said its net- work of Certified Uptime Centers has helped cut downtime and streamline the repair process at dealer- ships nationwide. Mack Certified Uptime Centers were introduced in late 2015, while Volvo Trucks rolled out its Certified Uptime Center process earlier this year. To-date, there are cur- rently 67 Mack Certified Uptime Centers across North America, and Volvo Trucks has 57 Certified Uptime Centers across the United States and Canada. Jeff Lester, senior vice president of sales for Volvo Trucks North America, said that by implementing stan- dardized workflows and service processes – including redesigned service bays – the company provides faster, more efficient service for its customers. "It allows consistency in our dealer network from east to west, from north to south," Lester said. Phillips Swaim, Volvo Group director of network fixed operations, said the idea behind the Uptime Center is to manage workflow in a manner that prevents major repairs from clogging up dealership bays. "The idea is don't let the short jobs get stuck behind the long jobs," Swaim said, adding repairs that take four hours or less head directly to the dealership's Uptime Bay. More complex repairs are directed to the Advanced Bay. Jim Ussery, executive vice president of operations for Nextran Truck Center – a Mack and Volvo dealership with 14 facilities across Florida, Alabama and Georgia – said his company folded many of the missions of Volvo's Certified Uptime Center into an existing internal push at the dealership called ROAR: Rapid Observation, Assess- ment and Repair. Under Nextran's ROAR initiative, technicians were challenged to assess a truck within an hour of its arrival to determine the potential length of repair time. Greg O'Connor, Nextran's director of service operations, said that if a repair time is determined to take less than five hours, their commitment is to dedicate all necessary resources to getting the truck out as quickly as possible. To expedite service, Certified Uptime Centers add a triage lane to quickly diagnose faults and better manage the time it would take to make the repair and make sim- ple repairs ahead of more complex repairs. Organizing service offerings, Swaim says, has led to a 22 percent increase in repair orders for the group's dealers and a 16 percent increase in labor sales. Volvo and Mack say their Certified Uptime Centers have shown an 8 percent improvement in service efficiency and a reduction of two-and-a-half days in the overall time a customer's vehicle spends at the dealership, minus the time required to perform the repair. Certified Uptime Centers offer a potential savings of up to $2,000 each day per event, reducing diagnos- tic times by 70 percent and repair times by 21 percent, Lester said. O'Connor said that in 2013, Nextran got 43 percent of repair jobs taking five hours or less out of the shop in fewer than 24 hours. By 2014, the company's success rate of pushing small jobs out in under a day swelled to 50 percent and to 55 percent in 2015. O'Connor said Nextran is up to 63 per- cent this year. Jonathan Randall, Mack's North American senior vice president of sales, said that since 2010, Mack dealer locations are up by more than 5 percent, and the com- pany has seen its service bays balloon by more than 40 percent. Mack employs 90 percent more technicians and has seen a more than 250 percent jump in its number of Master Technicians on the heels of a $500 million-plus investment in its dealership network. Since 2010, Volvo dealers have invested more than $530 million into expanding service, including adding 63 new locations, which has boosted bay capacity by 50 percent and service capacity by 63 percent. Volvo's technician labor force has grown by 109 percent, and the number of Master Techs has jumped by 372 percent. – Jason Cannon Greg O'Connor, Nextran Truck Center's director of service operations, demonstrates how the company's diagnostics platform reads fault data from the truck.