[IMAGE]Maintenance-1.jpg[/IMAGE]To keep up with the high standards customers hold for a transit agency's vehicles, maintenance departments are continuously working at making improvements in their shops, even as nationwide budget crunches eliminate funding in this all-important area.

"Customer service is job No. 1," says Mike Terry, CEO for the Indianapolis Public Transportation Corp. (IndyGo). "This aspect of customer service is making sure that our customers have the safest, cleanest and best operating vehicles on the street."

METRO Magazine found maintenance departments from around the nation that are reaping successes in the garage by increasing efficiencies and training, reorganizing, or establishing a rock-solid preventive maintenance program. 

Metro Transit-St. Louis

In 2002, after coming under severe internal scrutiny for having an admittedly "less than stellar" track record, Metro Transit-St. Louis' (Metro) vehicle maintenance department (VMD) took a look at the problems and issues they faced as well as the outcomes that were produced.

"Maintenance was fractured, but it wasn't like we weren't trying to work together," says Carl Thiessen, chief mechanical officer for Metro. "The real problem was that our costs were out of control and nobody could really explain what the costs were or why they were out of control."

With an open-minded approach, Metro decided to remake the maintenance department to not only restore credibility but also improve performance. To do this, the agency made several key organizational changes, including uniting its bus, van and rail VMDs under one umbrella with a new leader — previously each department had separate leaderships able to chart their own course, according to Thiessen.

With this change in place, the VMD team was challenged to design a maintenance program that would satisfy its organizational goals - providing safe, clean, reliable equipment as cost effectively as possible.

"We were never asked to find ways to reduce costs," says Thiessen. "We were challenged to justify every maintenance expenditure as a reasonable business decision that supported the goals."

Thiessen explains that the centerpiece of Metro's revamped vehicle maintenance was developed following extensive research of OEM ­manuals, recommendations from the ­industry and management's ­experience.

The outcome was a predictive maintenance program that directs Metro's largest financial investment for vehicle maintenance at the mid-life of the unit, which has increased reliability and enabled the agency to maximize its capital investment in equipment by stretching vehicle life years past the industry norm.

"The planned points are progressively comprehensive in scope through the life of the vehicle to eight years and about 400,000 miles," Thiessen explains. "Major repair or replacement is performed at the 200,000-, 300,000- and 400,000-mile points. After the 400,000-mile inspection point, work activity tapers off until the vehicle is retired at about 15 years of age and 750,000 miles," he says.

Every planned maintenance event has a bill, which includes wear as well as appearance items of materials that is supplied to the storeroom, and all maintenance events are forecasted 18 months in advance, giving the storeroom ample time to procure the necessary material, ­Thiessen adds.

Additionally, every month a one-, two- and three-month expected inspection report is generated and sent to maintenance managers and the storeroom. The one-month report is a list of the vehicles that must be inspected that month, and maintenance departments are required to schedule and complete inspections within the month indicated. The only other maintenance inspections completed are a bi-weekly safety inspection that mimics the driver daily pull out inspection and a 10,000-mile inspection.

"All grief items are to be repaired when found on inspection. Maintenance managers are constantly monitoring the condition of their equipment in an effort to identify trends. If a trend is indicated, every effort is made to add corrective action to the closest 50,000-mile maintenance event," says Thiessen. "This process precludes any reason to create campaigns; vehicle configurations are updated in accordance with the maintenance program."

The results of the program have been significant. In 2002, Metro's bus group achieved 10,124 miles between breakdowns compared with 21,827 miles between breakdowns in 2009 - a 115-percent improvement.

Since 2003, Metro has increased its cost per mile, which includes labor, fuel, commodities and parts, a remarkable 3 percent per year, from $1.22 to $1.52 in 2009.

Also, using an internal metric that measures dollars tied up in inventory, Metro had approximately $6.05 million dedicated to bus part inventory in 2002 compared with about $1.8 million in 2009 — a 75-percent reduction.

"This dramatic reduction frees up monies for other purposes, which is an ever increasing issue of importance to all transit systems," says Thiessen, who adds that Metro also had a 98.98-percent on-time performance in 2009.

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Indianapolis Public Transportation Corp.-Indianapolis

Facing the same budget issues that many transit agencies around the nation are struggling with, IndyGo went through a process that included an organizational restructuring, resulting in a new Director of Maintenance, Mike Moles, who in conjunction with IndyGo's Executive Leadership Team, established new maintenance department policies, procedures and expectations based on assessment and consultation by an external firm.

The auditing and monitoring aspect of the review process enabled IndyGo to identify and address resource issues that had potential to prevent operational improvements. The entire process not only improved operational efficiency but also saved jobs.

"When we started looking at raising the level of expectations, we looked at core competencies of things that we had been doing in the past in-house to see where we may need to make changes," explains IndyGo's CEO Mike Terry. "For example, we found that we were spending more to repair parts than it would cost us to just go out and buy a new one with a different warranty. This allowed us to not lay people off, but reposition people into things we weren't able to do before, such as painting buses and doing body repairs."

"Another one of the big things that we have really tackled is planning and scheduling," adds Moles. "We are moving the shop away from being reactive to proactive in that we are moving toward planning the work for the mechanics on each shift, each day."

By using the Mincom Ellipse Planning and Scheduling module, IndyGo's maintenance work is planned daily and weekly based on work load and technician resources. The increase in productivity through using the system enabled IndyGo to realize a huge decrease in overtime - from 20 percent per week to only 9 percent - resulting in a savings of approximately $500,000 dollars a year.

Within its Ellipse maintenance program, IndyGo also developed the use of APLs (associated parts list), which allows parts to be issued to a work order and pulled by storeroom personnel 24 hours before work is actually started, so that maintenance ­supervisors can issue work to a ­technician with parts ready for the ­assigned job.

To promote "fleet ownership," the agency also segmented its vehicles into six smaller fleets, making each maintenance supervisor, along with the corresponding team of technicians, responsible for their sub-fleet.

"Even though they [supervisors] are here for a specific shift, work the shift that day and are gone, they also have responsibility for their fleet's cleanliness, body damage, RCAs (root cause analyses) and a whole myriad of things that we get them to look at," says Moles. "It's really just having another set of eyes to help examine the overall fleet."

Currently, team efficiency is at 70 percent, which reflects an increase of 10 percent since the new sub-fleet system was developed in August 2009.

To continue to grow its efficiency, IndyGo has several new initiatives set to take place in the next few months, including moving to an all-paperless shop by providing laptops to ­technicians.

"When they come to work, they will log-in, swipe their card at a proximity reader and at the laptop their supervisor will have their work schedule there for that eight-hour shift," explains Moles.

The agency has also examined 150 jobs that the maintenance department does on a repetitive basis to establish standard repair times to help identify areas for technicians to improve though training and coaching.

Though many of IndyGo's changes have only been in place for a short time, Terry is quite pleased at this point with the results and the morale boost it has given employees.

"Once you start seeing the results, you take pride in doing a job well and the opportunity to learn something new and different," Terry says about the revamped maintenance department. "I feel very good that we're moving in a right direction. I feel good that we're also, from a taxpayer's standpoint, being good stewards of those dollars."

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Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority-Orlando, Fla.

In March, Orlando, Fla.-based Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority's (LYNX) maintenance team took the top prize for the fifth consecutive year at the 2010 State Roadeo. LYNX also won the Grand Champion Award by combining the maintenance team score with its operator's score.

One of the keys to LYNX's competitive success is training, says Deputy Chief of Maintenance Joe Cheney.

"We teach a course that's called 'Roadeo Style Training,' or 'Advanced Troubleshooting Skills,' which teaches how to think on your feet and diagnose problems in an organized fashion," says Cheney. "But, that is just one of the courses that we teach."

LYNX also provides training in areas including engines, transmissions and the all-electronic onboard network of the bus.

Additionally, the agency has training available for technicians on staff that specialize in certain areas, such as air conditioning. To do this, LYNX will bring in a Thermal King representative once a year to provide a two-day training class.

"Heat in the Orlando area is one of the big challenges because it taxes the A/C system, but we've handled that very well," says Cheney. "We do a lot of advanced training with people, who are already good, to make them better and are fortunate to have some very qualified people."

Restricting A/C system work to those qualified and extensively trained technicians has resulted in significantly fewer breakdowns over the years, according to Cheney. He adds that the constant training, as well as some of the maintenance programs put into place, play a huge role in helping LYNX keep its fleet operating and on the road, all while facing daunting ­fiscal constraints.

"We're all challenged by the financial crunch that we are under right now, so it is in our best interest to be sure that we are becoming cost effective," Cheney says. "Training is a big key to that, in the same vein safety is the No. 1 priority within the organization. It all transcends to our maintenance department, where safety is given the highest priority through such things as our vehicle inspection work practices."

As for the process of caring for its 266-bus fleet on a day-to-day basis, Cheney says it is an ongoing process that entails many "checks and ­balances."

"It's a constant monitoring and review of practices to make sure that they are working and efficient, and it's feedback going back and forth to make sure you are running a safe operation," he says.

To improve its feedback process even more, LYNX's maintenance department recently instituted a program in which one of its technicians talks to the operators as they pull in for the day, similar to the way you might talk to a service writer when taking a personal vehicle to the mechanic to be looked at. The idea of the program is to gain the best possible information by speaking firsthand to the people who are actually operating the vehicles.

"We can also compare the information we get back to whatever happens in our preventive maintenance programs and change those if necessary, to help reduce any issues or complaints," says Cheney.

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Free Ride Transit-Town of Breckenridge, Colo.

The Town of Breckenridge, Colo.-based Free Ride Transit System's maintenance staff of four technicians and one fleet supervisor credits its success of keeping its 13-bus fleet rolling to its preventive maintenance program.

"Service reliability is one of the essential things of operating a small fixed-route system in a world class ski resort destination," explains Maribeth Lewis-Baker, Free Ride's transit manager. "Without a good preventive maintenance program, we would likely have more breakdowns and at what would probably be at a very inconvenient time."

The standard service criteria for Free Ride's preventive maintenance, which includes all the standards such as changing the oil and oil filter; lubing all shafts, steering linkage, ball joints/king pins, u-joints, doors and any other grease points; and checking tires for tread depth and air pressure, wheels for cracks and lug tightness and brake linings, is every 3,000 miles.

To ensure inspections are done on time, staff retrieves the current mileage of service vehicles from the Vehicle Checklist completed by transit drivers on a daily basis. As a backup, a service sticker is affixed to each service vehicle's speedometer with the appropriate mileage of the next preventive maintenance.

If a maintenance and/or safety issue that requires immediate action is encountered during the preventive maintenance service, the vehicle is placed out of service until the work can be completed. Vehicles that are designated out of service are notated by whether the issue is maintenance or safety related. Vehicles with safety related/out-of-service conditions are red tagged and are prohibited from further use until the issues are ­resolved.

When the preventive maintenance service is complete, the completed and signed service form is filed in the fleet maintenance office within the service vehicle's paper file and a new service due sticker is affixed to the service vehicle's speedometer.

Moving an average of 100,000 people a month in the height of its busy season and with nine to 10 buses on the street at any one time, Lewis-Baker explains there is not a large margin of error, since they do not have the resources or excess equipment that some larger metropolitan agencies have.

"Our transit system is rolling 18 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. Our mechanics are very thorough when they complete a PM on one of our buses," she says. "Because we have such a small fleet, our mechanics have a pretty intimate relationship with each bus. They know every little quirk."

Free Ride derives many benefits from catching things early before they cause an out-of-service condition, because it enables the maintenance department to schedule its work better by ordering parts and doing maintenance on its own time schedule versus a breakdown happening on the street.

Lewis-Baker explains that Free Ride's mechanics, who also service all of the other equipment and vehicles for the other various town divisions, take pride in their work and knowing that every PM enhances safety for its passengers. Because of this, she is proud of her maintenance department's ability to get the job done.

"Our guys are always busy, which is why it is so impressive with how they are able to keep our service reliability for our transit system so high," she says. "When you think about it, we're a small fleet with some pretty big expectations. The fact that we do not have to cancel routes or service because we do not have a bus in service because of mechanical failures really shows that we're doing something right."

 

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