NASHVILLE. The Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) showed off a new “scorecard service” here at its annual convention this week; a benchmarking endeavor aimed at capturing and reporting on key industry data and trends so fleets can see how they stack up against their peers based on type and size of operation, industry or SIC (standard industrial classification) code, cargo type, and other parameters.
The “scorecard” will be supported by fleet maintenance platform provider Decisiv and TMC expects to make it a subscription-based service that will offer regular benchmarking updates every quarter.
“Trucking is a highly competitive industry with very low margins and companies should always be looking for ways to find a competitive edge. Understanding where you fit in the pecking order for key metrics is a good place to start,” Michael Riemer, Decisiv’s VP of products and channel marketing, explained to Fleet Owner.
“’How am I doing’ is always a question that a ‘learning organization’ should be asking – not just against your internal goals but against key metrics against your peers,” he added. “While there is no ‘silver bullet’ in a scorecard service that will magically reduce fleets total cost of ownership or operation, it can definitely provide insight into what the best in class fleets are doing and what areas a fleet might want to focus on.”
In other words, Reimer said that if you don’t measure it, you don’t manage it – and that goes for internal data as well as comparative data from a scorecard service. “The better educated a fleet is about how they are doing, the more likely they can create a plan for success going forward,” he explained.
“And who better to provide such a service than TMC – their recommended practices (RPs) are really just the output of discussions with their member fleets but not necessarily the background data that drove such documents,” Reimer emphasized. “Now TMC will be in a position to help their member organizations understand their maintenance operations better and also deliver other products and services to them based on this improved perspective.”
He added that, once launched, fleets signing up for the TMC Scorecard Service will be sent questionnaires every 4 to 8 weeks throughout the year.
“The long term objective is not to focus on specific providers, dealers or OEMs but higher level metrics that drive a fleets business – operational efficiency, profitability, etc.,” Reimer stressed. “The scorecard service should provide them insight into where they should focus their attention within their own organization and service supply chain. In other words, if a fleet better understands how it is doing on certain key metrics, they will need to decide based on their internal data and experience how to then apply changes across their service supply chain that will improve those metrics.”
