Maxum West, the Western Division of Maxum Petroleum, has implemented Dossier Maintenance Management software from Arsenault Associates for its fleet of 448 vehicles. Dossier is helping Maxum realize a projected $1.4 million year-over-year savings while improving maintenance quality and safety.
Maxum Petroleum Inc., based in Greenwich, Conn., is a national marketer and logistics company providing petroleum products for commerce and industry, including lubricants and custom blended fuels for highway vehicles, aircraft, railroads, ships, and more. Customers range from car repair franchises to ocean container lines. Maxum's Western Division serves customers from Texas north to Colorado and west to the California coast. The division's fleet comprises tractors, van trailers, tank trailers, stake bodies, and more.
According to John C. Washington, manager of fleet maintenance and compliance for Maxum's Western Division, Dossier was implemented in conjunction with a successful program to bring fleet maintenance in-house from third-party providers. The program began in July of 2011. Dossier was implemented in August.
"We wanted to do two things," Washington said. "One, we wanted to reduce our costs and, two, we wanted to improve our quality."
Besides implementing Dossier, the project involved equipping and staffing eight full-time maintenance shops in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas with 15 mechanics and 3 administrators.
"The quality improvement is evident in the CSA scoring and the feedback from our drivers," Washington said, noting that the division's CSA score for maintenance had gone from 23.9 in August to 13.1 in March of 2012. As in golf, lower CSA scores are better.
CSA, which stands for Compliance, Safety, and Accountability, is a mandatory safety program of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Maintenance is one of seven critical elements in a fleet's overall CSA rating. The rating numbers represent percentile ratings compared with similar fleets. Thus Maxum's 23.9 maintenance rating placed the fleet in the top quarter of its class. With a score of 13.1 the fleet is now in the top 14 percent for maintenance safety.
"Dossier ensured that we had our inspections conducted on time, our testing done on time. We input all driver write-ups to make sure we address them. Before, we had to shuffle paper to find things. Now we have constant tracking. We have that in front of us as a reminder that things have to get done. We stay on top of maintenance," he said.
"The cost savings is also evident," Washington continued. "Our fiscal year is over in a couple of months and we're looking at $1.4 million in savings year-over-year."
Arsenault was the first company Washington contacted for the committee considering maintenance software.
"The Dossier demo was the last that everyone got to see and that was the one everyone was happiest with," he said.
"Arsenault Associates is delighted that Maxum is reaping substantial benefits from their use of Dossier," said Bob Hausler, Arsenault's VP of Marketing and Technology. "In many cases, fleets that install new software and workflows can't quantify their savings and improved productivity because they didn't have historical data. In Maxum's case, we can see that the stakes are significant. It's also evident that they were already doing a good job, and even the step from good to great yields a huge savings. Imagine the savings that fleets who are not quite at the 'good' level could achieve."
Washington's division uses Dossier-on-Demand hosted software, which is ideal for managing multiple maintenance locations. Arsenault hosts the application at a high-availability datacenter with multiple levels of redundancy. User data is secured and is backup-up daily both at the data center and off-site.
