August, 2006

Pit Crew View

Treating your truck turnarounds like a racing pit will keep your trucks on the road—and the profits speeding in.

By Tom Fife

Everyone knows that the faster we can turn our trucks around in our operations, the more efficient and cost effective we can be. The ability to quickly and accurately load trucks for the next delivery and get them back out on the road shows up right on the bottom line.

When I ask these questions of my seminar attendees across the country, I receive more or less the same answers no matter where I am. First I ask: “How long does it take to turn your trucks around in your operation?” Then, “How long does it take to build any common type of load for delivery?” The answers I most commonly get are “I don’t know, we never tracked it” or “I think it takes 20 to 40 minutes per truck.” Both of these answers speak volumes about why we don’t seem to be able to improve getting in and out in the quickest time.

I equate getting in and out with the next delivery to racing’s pit stop: The turnaround time begins when our truck enters the yard and ends when the truck goes through our gate on the way to the next delivery. This is the total “pit stop” time. Here’s how to make the most of it.

Call Ahead

The truck driver should call in 15 minutes before reaching the yard to let the dispatcher, yard foreman and loaders (pit crew) know so they can be prepared for his arrival. A racecar driver would always alert the pit crew about his intended stop so his crew can be ready to service him.

Plan for Reloading

The delivery should be staged in a specific staging area and checked, with a loader keeping an eye out for the driver in order to direct him to where he will be reloaded. What would happen if racecar drivers just stopped wherever they liked? Penalties are issued for being outside the pit area and we too pay a penalty for having our incoming trucks going hither and yon when they enter our operation instead of directly to the reloading area.

Have a good reload plan! Who is loading? Where is the next load? Do we need hardware with the load? Is everything staged together, or do we need to get the long-length items from another area to the staging/loading area? Are we unloading a return off the truck? A pit crew needs to have all of the materials ready (tires, gas, adjustments) when the driver comes in to minimize the time it takes to get him back on the road.

Prepare the Next Delivery

Have directions ready for the driver for his next delivery. Stop trying to find directions by asking: “Hey, has anybody been to that job before? OK, isn’t that by the job we did last year? I need to call the salesman to find out where it is?” A racecar driver has a spotter to let him know where he should go.

Track Results

Once the pit stop procedures are in place, we need a way to evaluate our success. If we don’t track things, we have no way of knowing if we are getting better or worse. A simple tracking system for your pit stops is a sheet of paper with columns for the date, person, load or delivery, start and finish time, customer, order/invoice number and a space for remarks. It looks almost too simple, but if you capture this information you will be able to track your pit stop times and learn many other valuable insights about your operation.

When you implement this “pit-stop” tracking you will easily see who your top drivers, load builders and pit-crew members really are. Just as in racing, we can’t know what we need to do to get better until we put a stopwatch on what we are doing currently.

The efficiency of the time we spend in the lumberyard “pits” directly affects our ability to be profitable.