A regional carrier we work with — 32 tractors, Stockton-based — was running 11.2 days of unplanned downtime per truck per year when we started. Within one quarter, that number was down to 6.6. Here's how it happened.
Start by counting
We spent the first month doing nothing but a baseline. Every truck got a full inspection, every finding logged with a severity grade. The point wasn't to fix things yet — it was to know what we were looking at.
The baseline showed something the operations team suspected but couldn't prove: 60% of unplanned downtime was concentrated in eight specific trucks. Those eight became the priority list.
Move from reactive to scheduled
We established a standing second-Tuesday-of-the-month inspection visit. Every truck in the fleet was on a quarterly cycle. The eight problem trucks got monthly.
Critically: the carrier's own maintenance team did all the repair work. We just told them what was coming. That preserved their relationship with parts vendors and kept the work in-house.
Document for the insurer
By month three, the carrier had a documented inspection trail across every vehicle. At the next insurance renewal, the underwriter knocked a meaningful amount off the premium.
The maintenance manager later told us the program had paid for itself twice over in insurance savings alone, before counting the downtime reduction.
The boring punchline
Nothing in this program was clever. It was just consistent. The hard part isn't knowing what to inspect — it's actually doing it on schedule, with documentation, on every vehicle.
— Alejandro Murillo