Freightliner looks to limit downtime to three days, max

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Truck News / July 30, 2014

Freightliner has set an internal goal to limit the downtime of its vehicles to no more than three days, for even major repairs.

Richard Howard, the company’s newly appointed senior vice-president of sales and marketing, revealed the plan during a press event.

“We have set a key aspiration for us,” he said. “The maximum time a truck should be in the shop is three days, as a maximum. We don’t want any of our customers’ trucks being in the shop longer than three days.”

Freightliner is currently using telematics and its Uptime Pro management program to better monitor the time its customers’ trucks spend in the shop. Daimler plans to use that data to become more involved in the repair process, ensuring the required parts are readily available and other measures, some of which will be best practices already employed by top dealers.

While it’s still too early in the process to determine how long the average truck spends in the shop, it’s well under three days, Howard indicated. However, he also acknowledged there’s room for improvement.

Freightliner has introduced other measures to improve uptime, including launching Express Assessment, which provides a diagnosis, checks parts availability and produces an estimate within two hours of a service write-up.