TMC Plans the Ultimate Truck Maintenance Web Site
John Bendel
Technology Editor
Trucking wants to borrow a page from the airline industry — a web page to be specific.
The Technology and Maintenance Council of the ATA is sponsoring a project called TMC FleetPortal.com (www.fleetportal.com), a trucking maintenance resource on the Internet. The project was introduced at TMC's March meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
FleetPortal.com hopes to cut across proprietary barriers of manufacturer and brand names to provide a single, easily accessed information source for fleet maintenance professionals. The site will be modeled after the SPEC2000 Marketplace, an airline industry site at www.spec2000.com on the Web. SPEC2000 describes itself as "a comprehensive set of e-business specifications, products and services." SPEC2000 is sponsored by the Air Transport Assn. and serves more than 380 airlines and suppliers.
The TMC effort to establish a similar trucking resource is headed by Dave Foster, maintenance director for Southeastern Freight Lines of Lexington, S.C. Foster chairs the TMC FleetPortal.com Task Force.
"It's going to be an electronic information exchange," he said of FleetPortal.com. "Hopefully it's going to bring some efficiencies to not only the manufacturing community but also to the end user. The end user will have one place where he can go to get information he needs about his fleet."
According to the FleetPortal.com web site, truck fleets now "wrestle with multiple proprietary OEM/supplier parts-numbering systems, paper and electronic catalogs, and mountains of other data in various formats." In other words, it's a system that is "outdated, redundant and inefficient."
A Host Of Benefits
FleetPortal.com claims it will fix all that by providing accelerated procurement, 24/7 availability, real-time delivery status, reduced inventory, fewer telephone calls, faxes, paper forms, handling and postage, just for starters. You'll find a long list of anticipated benefits on the site under the heading "What, Why and Benefits."
For the moment, however, FleetPortal.com is still more dream than reality.
"We're in the conceptual stages. Right now we're just trying to do research and see if there is a need for it. Then we'll move forward and try to put a business plan together," Foster said.
Visitors to the FleetPortal.com demo site can fill out a survey form that gauges their degree of interest. Foster said relatively few surveys had been completed as of early May, but the site had clearly stirred interest.
"The week of March 30th we had 4,930 hits on the web site. April 9 alone we had 4,524 hits," Foster noted.
The site was created by TMC and its partner in the project, Continental Data Graphics of El Segundo, Calif. Continental, or CDG as it's called, is owned by Boeing Corp.
"CDG had done this for the airline industry and had been at it for some time. It looked like a good answer to what the ground transportation industry needed," Foster said.
The Idea Takes Shape
The initial TMC task force met last fall, and included representatives of CDG and TMC. "There were about five or six TMC board members at the meeting. We talked about the concept of getting this site up and running," Foster said.
"Southeastern supplied (CDG) with information on some of our equipment. Volvo was kind enough to provide them with information on some of their parts and service catalogs just to get started — to get an example of what it could be. We tweaked it several times to get to where we're at right now," Foster said.
Foster and TMC believe FleetPortal.com can offer benefits to individual fleets, suppliers and to the industry as a whole. For example, they hope the site will encourage industrywide use of the VMRS 2000 parts identification system.
VMRS, which stands for Vehicle Maintenance Recording Standard, dates back to 1969 when TMC recognized that a standard coding system would enable fleets, vendors and OEMs to analyze the performance of vehicles, components, parts and the maintenance function itself. To create that standard they translated virtually every element of maintenance, from parts to procedures, into numeric codes easily handled by computer. The current, updated VMRS 2000 debuted in 1997.
An Opportunity For VMRS
While many large fleets, including those of FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service, have adopted VMRS in recent years, it remains largely unused in the greater fleet maintenance community. TMC hopes a vibrant FleetPortal.com can change that.
According to information on the site, FleetPortal.com will be able to export universal VMRS data to a fleet's internal system. The site will alert users when updated VMRS is available and ready for download. Thus maintenance people will be able to implement VMRS with far less work than it would take otherwise. Wide adoption could help fulfill the 30-plus-year-old promise of VMRS.
FleetPortal.com will also provide a convenient source for maintenance literature and updates.
"Now you have to juggle the Internet and different CD-ROMs," Foster said. "In our operation — and I know all the other fleets have the same problem — we have information overload."
FleetPortal.com will ease that problem by providing only that information needed by individual fleets. Fleet users will enter their specific fleet makeup and FleetPortal.com will make available just information that applies to those trucks and that fleet.
Perhaps the biggest question, though, is who will pay for FleetPortal.com. Fleet users, suppliers or a combination?
"That has not been defined," Foster said.
Proprietary Concerns
Not everyone welcomes the FleetPortal.com concept. Foster described the attitude of manufacturers as "mixed."
"I think some manufacturers would be better served to outsource some of this type of information they do internally themselves now. Some are looking at what they can do to better serve their customers, especially a customer who runs a diverse fleet.
"Everybody worries about proprietary information. That's the subject that keeps on coming up," he said.
Still, Foster expects that dubious manufacturers will be won over. That's what happened in the airline industry, he noted.
