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When we are young, we think we are bulletproof. Nothing will hurt us, we believe, and as a result we (at least the males of the species) are not too responsible when it comes to having an annual physical. In fact, many young men don’t even have a relationship with a doctor. When things start breaking down, however, well then we go to a doctor. If we had gone earlier and regularly we could have avoided many of our so-called breakdowns.

It is identical with a machine.

The equipment companies, the OEMs, go to a lot of trouble to create an owner’s and operator’s manual, in which there are detailed outlines of various kinds of maintenance that should be performed; from the daily maintenance requirements to the full preventative maintenance programs. There are schedules and checklists, both complete and easy to understand. But similar to the health of our bodies, we assume when the machine is new and clocking few hours of work that performing maintenance is less important. As a result, the maintenance work, which is not really “defined maintenance” is very cursory and done in passing – a lube job and/or a filter and fluid change. This is done by someone who does not possess formal mechanical training. There is no checklist, no “blood test,” no “EKG.” In fact, as dealers we have been derelict in our duties in not pointing out this problem more directly, consistently and seriously. We have contributed to the false impression that maintenance isn’t that important. This is caused by the view of service management, and it always has been.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a broad expansion of the equipment model types from most of the major manufacturers. Dealers had a hard time keeping up with the training and tooling requirements. There were start-up quality problems, and warranty repairs were a serious problem. What happened? We stopped doing the maintenance work; after all, we didn’t have time for that stuff. That was the genesis of the problem we are living with today and the first element of the problem we face today. We, the dealers, didn’t deem the maintenance work to be as important as the repair work. Of course that is true; a machine that is not in production should be repaired and put back to work, but it starts a vicious cycle that more machines will fail the longer that maintenance is put off.

Something else steered us in the wrong direction and at cross-purposes to one of our main goals of reducing the owning and operating costs for the machine owner. That detour we took was the notion that we needed to employ a journeyman mechanic to perform maintenance. This was based on the belief that the machine would have to be repaired after the maintenance, to fix everything that we found wrong with it. It was well meaning, but it put us out of the market price point for simple, pure maintenance.

We need a team of specifically trained maintenance specialists to perform maintenance and not to do any repair work.

So now we are confronting the arrival of the Tier 4 engines, which will cost equipment owners an extremely high price if they are not maintained properly. This presents an opportunity to the dealer group to get serious again about maintenance, and get back in the game. We need maintenance mechanics, specifically trained and in a separate group of employees who will never perform repairs while doing their maintenance work. This is part of my “ProTech” business within the dealership – the maintenance group. They have a separate identity, uniforms and vehicles; they are managed separately and have their own financial department so that their work is tracked and managed as seriously as any other operating department.

So there you have it – maintaining capital equipment, the right way. Remember the customer, the machine owner, has said over and over again, if we could provide maintenance services within the price range they were currently paying they would give us the business. In the Product Support Opportunities Handbook of 2008, the survey received a 44 percent affirmative response to that question. Maintenance is half of the labor hours put on our equipment over the lifetime of the machine, and 44 percent of customers say they would give us the work if our price was in line. Why are we walking away from this opportunity, particularly at this point in time? Can you give me a logical reason? I didn’t think so.