I am Lars Möller, General Manager, After Sales for ASE, and it is my mission to help you get more out of your vehicles by sharing my industry experience with you.
This is the first of 10 weekly newsletters that will help you to operate smarter and put you on the road to earning more.
After many years in commercial vehicle after sales in the Middle East and North Africa, there is one burning issue that always confuses me: Why are customers ready to pay 10 times more for a repair on failure rather than the much smaller cost of maintenance to prevent failure?
I’d appreciate if you could let me know your thoughts on this – as this as this is an area where you can make huge savings.
Many customers are also convinced that fuel and tyre costs are fixed and cannot be changed. Not true.
When the financial crisis hit the region many of our customers were in a fix, asking: “How do we make money when income is down and operating costs on items such as fuel are up significantly?”
Many of our customers struggled even more due to major component failures which were a result of them cutting costs on maintenance and repair.
Because of these issues we, at ASE, want to challenge established methods and reasoning. We’re developing new, smarter ways to work so that you, the customer, can benefit.
This series of newsletters is designed to share these ideas with you.
We have solutions that could save you up to 10 per cent on your operating cost. Maybe more.
The best part is that many of the tips are absolutely free and very easy to implement. Can your business afford not to give it a try?
Smart and Easy
The foundation of our programme is extremely simple:
We want you to earn more money. Much more.
How?
We believe that we can help you do that by avoiding costly failures through preventive measures, making real savings on tyres and fuel and by operating vehicles in a smarter, greener and more economical way. All you need to do is be prepared to learn a few new ideas. It’s a win-win situation.
Here are our 4 cornerstones:
1. Reducing your cost per failure by early detection
Consider a maintenance agreement, with oil samples and regular inspections. Research shows that up to 70 per cent of unplanned stops can be avoided through regular check-ups. You may worry about the initial expenditure, but how much do unplanned stops hurt your business?
2. Increasing the time between failures by working on the real root causes
Many vehicle problems come from dirty air, dirty fuel and dirty oil. Customers can save up to 90 per cent on their cost of unplanned repairs by replacing items shortly before they fail and cause major downtime.
3. Focus on the drivers as their actions affect the cost of repairs
I’ve had customers where the cost of maintenance and repair varied by as much as AED50,000 per truck per year between the least and the most expensive truck repair. The only variable was the driver. This shows that with a little driver education you can achieve a big saving on your bottom line.
4. Implement savings on fuel and tyres with improved driving habits
Fuel and tyres account for up to 50 per cent of all operating costs and many customers think there is no way to change that. We believe we can help you save 20-30 per cent on fuel and 10-20 per cent on tyres. What’s more, most of the savings cost nothing to implement and just require changing a few habits.
Next Week
In our next mail we’ll show you the first of nine smart steps towards better vehicle profitability. By reducing your operating costs and gaining More Time on the Road we will enable you to take full control of your operation, avoid costly disruptions, and gain a better market reputation while significantly improving your bottom line. The only thing we ask in return is a few moments of your time once a week.
We look forward to your feedback. Let us know what you think and what areas of maintenance and repair you’d like to learn more about.
More Time on the Road
with Al Shirawi Enterprises (ASE)Lars Möller, General Manager, After Sales
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Dear Kami,
Thanks for your inputs. I’ll check it out to see if this is suitable for this campaign.
Lars Moller, GM After Sales
Very Smart way to inform the customer.
I think if you can deliver the same massage with less text would be better.
plaese even add an option for they who dose not have any trucks.
good job and good luck
Regards Rahim
Dear Rahim,
Thanks for your inputs. We’re following a particular format where we balance the content and the text. With so many different cultures in this country it is always an issue with how the message should be presented. Many of the tips we put forward are also useful for our construction equipment customers and the series will contain special offers directed to those customers as well.
Lars Moller
Greetings,
I have been waiting a lot for this V.GOOD ideas.
Regarding preventive maintenance, if we do proper preventive maintenance, what the maximum mileage we can get before opening engine?.
THANKS,
Engr/ EMAD.
Emad,
thanks for your response. As regards to engine life there are a lot of factors impacting this. Some are, vehicle type, application, driver skills, how much idle time (during idle your engine wear doubles), fuel quality, oil quality, coolant quality etc. One way to estimate expected life is to run regular oil samples. Once you start having a series of data for that engine, the oil lab can help you to plot a curve with estimated engine life. Oil samples will also help you to detect problems before they become catastrophic failures. Please let me know if you want our service department to contact you.
Lars Moller, GM After Sales