April 20, 2016 Vol. 13 No. 8

Last week I had the pleasure of chairing the inaugural Canadian Fleet Maintenance Summit, ‘CFMS’ for short, a day in advance of our Truck World show. It gave a nod to an event that was for decades the main Canadian gathering for techs and shop supervisors. Save for the acronym, it bore no resemblance to that past staple of our world — the Canadian Fleet Maintenance Seminar, though many of the same people sat on our organizing committee.

In fact, and this represents a significant achievement, our event drew together all the various maintenance-oriented organizations that have staged get-togethers of their own in recent years. We partnered mainly with Yves Provencher and the PIT Group, part of Quebec’s FP Innovations, which had held a conference in each of the previous two years.

A shout-out to our sponsors is in order here. Our gold sponsor was Castrol Heavy Duty Lubricants through its distributor, Wakefield Canada. Silver sponsor was Trailer Wizards, and lunch was served courtesy of Cummins Canada. Volvo Trucks Canada was much involved too, choosing the CFMS lunch as the venue for the presentation of their 2016 Canadian Fleet Maintenance Manager of the Year winner. Remarkably, this was the 26th year of the Volvo award, which deserves a shout-out all its own.

If I do say so myself, the day was a resounding success, attracting more than 200 attendees and a very fine collection of keynote speakers and panelists from here and the U.S. In the crowd were representatives of TMC, the Technology and Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations.

Keynote addresses came from Bill Dawson, Vice President of Maintenance Operations and Engineering for Ryder System in Miami, and from Kirk Altrichter, Vice President, Maintenance, at Nebraska’s Crete Carrier Corp. Kirk is a former TMC chairman as well.

THE DAY BEGAN WITH A PANEL SESSION entitled The Electronics Revolution and Trucking of the Future, which I moderated. My six panelists were Michael Riemer, VP Products and Channel Marketing at Decisiv Inc. in Virginia; Skip Yeakel, Principal Engineer/Government Industry Academia Link at Volvo Trucks in North Carolina; Yves Maurais, Technical Director, Asset Management, Purchasing and Conformity at Quebec’s Groupe Robert; Ric Bedard, President of Cetaris in Toronto; Larry Jordan, VP Product Management at Zonar Systems in California; and Kirk Altrichter.

Having ‘banned’ PowerPoint presentations from the session in favor of a Q and A format, my intent was to create a discussion dealing specifically with the mountain of data that fleet managers must deal with. It’s an awfully important part of our future in both the maintenance shop and the fleet manager’s office but the question is what do you do with it? Do you even know how much can be collected, I asked?