How Fleetio Saves a Trucking Company Thousands on Parts

Intra City Dispatch is a trucking and brokerage company based in Muskegon, Michigan. With its fleet of tractor-trailers, straight trucks and cargo vans, it provides local and over the road transportation of general freight. To maximize the uptime of its vehicles, the company employs three technicians to perform maintenance and repair work.

Jennifer Lamkin, Maintenance Controller at Intra City Dispatch, ensures those technicians always have the parts they need. She handles purchase orders, receives parts when they come in and keeps a close eye on the company's inventory at all times.

Before Intra City Dispatch implemented Fleetio, Jennifer grappled with a 20,000-row spreadsheet to track the company's parts. Technicians would fill out work orders on paper and she would manually transcribe them into Excel, updating inventory counts by hand as she went through each ticket. That process was incredibly time-consuming for all involved and prone to errors. Plus, because of how cumbersome it was to navigate such a massive spreadsheet, discrepancies would regularly go unnoticed, resulting in thousands of dollars worth of parts effectively vanishing into thin air.

Improving part inventory control with Fleetio

Fortunately, both Intra City Dispatch's workflows and inventory management have improved dramatically since rolling out Fleetio. Gone are the days of paper work orders and hours of data entry. Now, technicians complete orders from their phones, and when a part gets added to a work order in Fleetio, Intra City Dispatch's inventory count is automatically updated.

According to Jennifer, the convenience of digital work orders not only saves technicians time, but inspires them to pay closer attention to detail as well.

I think it has to do with the guys' ease of typing it on their phones. They're being more descriptive of what they're doing. Jennifer Lamkin, Maintenance Controller

That additional thoroughness has resulted in far fewer instances of technicians not including the parts they used on work orders. By extension, this improvement in data quality has equipped Jennifer with an indispensable paper trail (that's actually entirely digital). Now, when parts go missing, she's able to use work orders to help find them much more consistently. And that improved recovery rate has benefited Intra City Dispatch's bottom line in a major way.

Our inventory loss went down by probably $30,000 in the last two years using this system. Jennifer Lamkin, Maintenance Controller

Using automation to improve data accuracy

Easy access to reliable data in Fleetio empowers Jennifer to be a highly effective steward of Intra City Dispatch's parts. And, just recently, Fleetio gained a new, set-and-forget feature that makes fleet records even more accurate.

Using automation, Fleetio users can configure "if this, then that"-style rules that the system processes autonomously. For example, Intra City Dispatch has set up a rule where, if a work order indicates that a vehicle is in their shop, then that vehicle's status is automatically updated to reflect "in the shop."

As soon as a work order has started, boom, [the vehicle is] listed as being in the shop. I don't have to worry about somebody going "Is that truck in the shop today?"

Like when a truck stops just to get windshield wipers. Those kinds of mini maintenance things get missed as "in the shop"/"out of the shop" things.

This being automated, we don't have to worry about it. We can see every time a truck stops to get something done on it. Jennifer Lamkin, Maintenance Controller

Before this automation, it was fairly common at Intra City Dispatch for vehicles to get worked on while having an "active" status for all or most of its time in the shop. But now, even if someone forgets to update a vehicle's status, Fleetio makes the proper change automatically.

Having more accurate vehicle statuses avoids confusing discrepancies and provides Intra City Dispatch with clearer visibility over its fleet. And as more automations are added to Fleetio, the company aims to improve the reliability of its fleet data even more so it can use that information more effectively in its operations.

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