Managing the business side of Green

If I had to guess off the top of my head, I'd say I have some where around a million dollars worth of machines in my building.  Some are super highly specialized like a fairway mower costing the same as a luxury four door sedan, and others as simple as a side walk edger.  Regardless, all of these machines require maintenance.  We are fortunate to have a superb Equipment Manager, Frank Novotny, who is responsible for maintaining it all. 

The world of fleet maintenance management is not like it used to be.  When I was a kid, my father was a fire fighter and the fire department's mechanic.  Every chance I got I went with him to turn wrenches and I can tell you that way back then, the sophisticated fleet management system used to maintain life saving fire trucks was a chalk board, a pencil, a pad of paper and a file cabinet.  We would do the work, write down what we did (hopefully you didn't get too much grease all over the paper while trying to write) and then put the paper in the appropriate file in the drawer.  Now however, my fleet maintenance management system is a very comprehensive computer program that tracks usage, repair costs, inventories and a whole lot more.  The picture below is a screen snap shot from our fleet management system which is 100% web based.  I can enter and access the data from any internet connection, even my IPhone.  In the picture there's a lot of information.  It shows things like when something is due for service and how many hours each piece of machinery has.  I can also look up other information about specific items like cost of ownership and maintenance costs compared to repair costs.

List of all my carts with service indicators...green is good, red square means due for service

When something is due for service, the fleet management system is programed with all the different activities and services that are required for each specific machine, at that specific time.  As a machine ages, different "things" need to be done to it.  For example: every 100 hours (we use hours of service instead of miles) the oil might need to be changed, but every third oil change the front wheel brakes might require adjusting.  Each piece of equipment has different maintenance schedules and the program has all the different service schedules built into it. 

This is how it all works.  Once a week, usually towards the end of the week, our Equipment Manager Frank takes an hour reading of every machine and enters the hours into the program.  When a specific machine exceeds it's allotted hours and requires a service, the computer automatically flags that unit for service within the program and generates a work order..  On Mondays, Frank goes into the program and runs a report of open work orders and the program generates a list of flagged items.  Within the report will be every machine that needs service based on hours used, what has to be done for each piece of machinery, what parts will be required for the service and the report will even tell the service technician in what storage bin the parts are located in the parts room. 

Yes that's right, the fleet management system also is an inventory management system.  All of my spare parts to keep the fleet running are able to be put into the programs and cataloged.  Over the past three years Frank has been working on trying to figure out what exactly was in what he called "the magical mystical parts room!"  Inventory management was so bad when I got here that it became a joke at the shop to say "don't order anything yet, let's go look in the parts room first."  It really didn't matter if it was to repair a machine or fix a broken irrigation pipe.  Frank has done a great job for us doing what he could, but to put the final nail in the bad inventory coffin I brought in one of our main vendors to do an accurate hard inventory count.  This way we can finally see what parts we still have for machines that we no longer have, as well as finish cataloging all inventory within the parts inventory piece of our fleet management software.

First we had to empty the parts room.  There was so much, well...crap (it's the most appropriate word) that a total emptying was the only was to go.  We found 5 year old candy in those blue bins in the back ground.

The next step was to count and catalog every widget, gizmo, nut, bolt, screw and spark plug we had.  Pictured here is our main vendor's service manager, parts manager and technology manager from left to right.  The guy on the left is the lead guy clearing out all of the crap from the stuff we want to keep.  The guy in the middle identifies all of the same items, counts them and finds a new home in the parts bins behind him.  The guy on the right enters all the different items, quantity, description and new bin number location into the fleet management system.  If you look at the floor you can see the outline of an parts bin that used to plug up the middle of the parts room, there was really two bins plugging everything up.  Through this process Frank was able to eliminate all the clutter and open up the space to be able to move around in the room.

Now instead of being the "magical, mystical parts room"  we have a neat, organized and computerized inventory.  Everything with a place and in it's place. 

Each item has it's own bin that is labeled with a unique number.  The computer now knows what gizmo and how many gizmos are in each bin.