Keep Downtime to a Minimum

If a contractor had an arch nemesis, “Downtime” would be his name. Whether it’s Mother Nature or broken down equipment keeping the guys from the job, nothing brings the ax down on productivity-and profit-faster than workers sitting around doing absolutely nothing.We have to accept that we can’t do anything about the weather, but we can do something about stalled equipment, and that something is a service vehicle, such as a mechanics truck.

“When a machine goes down, a lot of things come to a screeching halt-production stops. Whatever that machine is responsible for stops, so we need to get that thing up and going as fast as possible,” says Jay Love, a sales representative with 
Des Moines, Iowa-based Star Equipment, which sells service vehicles and owns some in order to better serve their rental customers. “Sometimes it’s not possible to repair equipment in the field, but the majority of the time, they are repairable in the field.”

Although service vehicles offer benefits for any construction company, these units are often most beneficial to contractors who use heavy equipment that’s not easily transportable, says Tim Worman, product manager of commercial vehicles for Iowa Mold Tooling Co., Inc. (IMT), which manufactures bodies for service vehicles such as mechanics trucks, mobile lubrication trucks and tire handlers.

“This is mostly advantageous for companies with large, heavy equipment, but no matter what the contractor’s size, you reduce your downtime by doing field service because you’re not losing operation time from transporting the equipment back and forth to the shop,” Worman says. “Construction companies should look at a service vehicle purchase as something that will pay for itself pretty quickly. You’re going to look at cutting out a day of travel time that you can put back into productivity. Ask yourself, ‘How many days of productivity do I gain and how quickly can I pay that truck back?’”

For example, assume field service will gain you at least a day of production time every time a piece of heavy equipment breaks down, and if you then  figure on saving about $200 an hour-wages and everything-that’s $1,600 saved for an eight-hour day, so you’d only need to save a month’s worth of days in order to pay back a $50,000 service truck. Depending on the size of the equipment being serviced and the size of your company, the hourly estimated rate could be much lower or much higher, which affects the amount of time it takes to pay back the cost of a service truck.

A service vehicle can make equipment repairs in the field such as replacing or repairing hydraulic cylinders, track components, scraper blades, buckets, hydraulic pumps, engines, transmissions, etc.  From a preventive maintenance schedule perspective, a service vehicle can perform such routine tasks as repacking cylinders or doing oil changes.

Speaking from Experience

McAninch Corp., based out of Des Moines, IA, has been buying service trucks for about twenty-five years, says Dwayne McAninch, the company’s founder and CEO. From underground utility construction, to Department of Transportation road work, to private site development, McAninch does a broad range of construction jobs, and their fleet of transport and maintenance vehicles makes it possible for them to quickly mobilize to any site in the continental United States.

Jason Paulson, equipment manager for McAninch, says the company owns many service vehicles and two lubrication vehicles, and they typically buy two or three more service trucks every year.

“Service vehicles dramatically speed up your equipment downtime,” Paulson says. “When we call a dealer, sometimes it’s a day before you get them out to the field, and the equipment just sits there. With service trucks, we can write our own destiny. You can prioritize your own downtime, and it just speeds everything up.”

“It easily cuts your downtime in half. Easily. And downtime is lost production and lost profits,” he says. “Service trucks are the No. 1 way to minimize downtime.”

For McAninch, it’s very common for a service vehicle to be instrumental in meeting a deadline. “We run these big trucks out of town on our big jobs, and you just can’t haul the equipment back to the shop, so it’s an ongoing thing,” Paulson says. “Every day, service vehicles are saving us time.”

Dwayne McAninch has always been a big proponent of the value of service vehicles to the construction business owner. “Service vehicles are absolutely instrumental in improving our bottom line,” McAninch says. “I don’t know how you could run a company the size of ours without service vehicles. It’s of utmost importance.”

To the owner of a smaller construction company who might still be on the fence about whether buying a service vehicle is a smart investment, McAninch only has one thing to say, “Get off the fence and go buy one.”

Preventive Maintenance

Mechanics trucks aren’t the only service vehicles that can be useful for doing preventive maintenance in the field; there are also mobile lubrication vehicles. The common methods of vehicle lubrication for companies are transporting the equipment back to the shop, driving around a pickup with 5-gallon pails of oil or mounting a lube skid to a service vehicle. The first two options come with significant drawbacks. Transporting the machines back to the shop is costly and time consuming, and the 5-gallon-pail method promotes rampant oil contamination. Lugging around pails of oil and antifreeze and manually pouring the liquids into the equipment using funnels is a method that takes much longer than using a lube truck, and contamination is almost guaranteed, greatly reducing engine life.

So that’s where either the lube skid or the mobile lubrication truck comes into play. The mobile lubrication skid is a happy medium between a full-service mobile lubrication vehicle and the antiquated method of using pails. The lube skid fits conveniently in the back of service trucks and consists of tanks with hoses to top off engine fluids. Most general contractors will find that their preventive maintenance and field repair needs are met with a lube skid mounted on a mechanics truck.  Businesses that use lube trucks enjoy the benefits of the lowest level of oil contamination, which of course leads to longer equipment life.

What it really comes down to is mechanics trucks and lube trucks working together to keep your equipment running as smoothly as possible for as long as possible.

Construction Business Owner, January 2006