Efficiency and Safety: Fisher Auto Parts Optimizes Telematics Usage

Efficiency and Safety: Fisher Auto Parts Optimizes Telematics Usage

Founded in 1929, Fisher Auto Parts is a third generation, privately held company headquartered in Staunton, VA. Fisher’s Motto, ‘Out the Door in Four’ means they are committed to sending parts out the door in four minutes enabling their service partners to complete repairs for their customers in a timely manner. And their fleet of over 2500 pool vehicles is an integral part of meeting this commitment. 

In managing Fisher’s fleet, Vic Stewart, Vice-President, Corporate Purchasing, and Joe Rader, Vice-President, Risk Services, have both achieved substantial goals worth sharing. For Vic, optimizing vehicle utilization across their 450 locations is crucial to managing supply chain challenges and improving overall fleet efficiency. And for Joe, safety is partly a passion mission rooted in his twenty-six years Virginia State Police career, which included duties of accident investigation/reconstruction and documentation using both traditional and more advanced techniques, including Leica laser scanning, which also expanded to crime scenes. His experience includes analyzing crash rates, dynamics, behaviors, crash location clusters and trends to implement local or geographic highway safety programs. Telematics has played a key role in helping both Vic and Joe succeed.

Utilization

Given the considerable changes in customer behaviors early in the pandemic, along with various supply chain challenges, Fisher began questioning, “How do we ensure our fleet is optimized so that we continue to meet or exceed customer service expectations?” With this question in mind, they embarked on a more detailed and granular examination of their fleet utilization, harnessing telematics data.

They were already compiling all of the telematics data for pool delivery vehicles at store locations, and they were able to assess underutilized vehicles via traditional utilization reports like miles driven over 30 or 90 days, sales versus number of vehicles per location, and more. However, they believed a better understanding of their vehicle utilization could be gleaned using the telematics data they were capturing in their utilization assessment. After several iterations and using various parameters, they agreed to define ‘utilization’ by the number of hours a vehicle operates during a location’s business operating hours. 

Wheels overlaid the historical telematics operating activity over Fisher’s actual store operating hours giving them a new level of visibility. Not only could they see if the vehicle was being driven, but they could see when it was being driven down to the exact hour and minute. Viewing the data in a user-friendly format, vehicle use patterns became evident allowing them to identify underutilized vehicles and ‘right-size’ their fleet accordingly. The aim of “right-sizing” was not necessarily to eliminate the vehicle, but to reassign the asset to a location in need overcoming one of the major business-related issues presented by supply chain challenges – the inability to acquire new vehicles promptly. This newfound visibility also unveiled a fresh opportunity allowing them to identify potential for ‘Delivery Vehicle Sharing’ in specific geographic regions where patterns aligned between locations. 

While this report was initially developed to address one of the many challenges associated with the pandemic, they now utilize it regularly as an invaluable tool to help locate opportunities for improvement and maximize fleet utilization.

Safety

Joe Rader’s first fatal investigation took place in August 1986, marking the sole instance when his badge was torn from his uniform. He was standing on a porch on a rainy evening when the deceased’s wife opened the door. As soon as she saw him, she instinctively understood the bad news. As he attempted to console her, he explained that her husband had run off the road, overcorrected, and rolled the vehicle, which led to his ejection. The grief-stricken wife, unable to contain her emotion, lashed out and ripped the badge from his shirt. Through his career as a Virginia State police officer having investigated or supervised horrific crimes investigations and 80 fatal accidents, he believes car crashes are among the most violent forms of loss. With this unique perspective, enhancing driver safety is one of his lifelong passions.

Although Joe does not believe there is a one size fits all gold standard safety program, he does encourage benchmarking against similar fleets. He emphasizes using tools and resources that yield results while constantly seeking new information from experiences and data. Fisher has fostered a ‘culture of safety’ by implementing key fobs, score carding policies, matrices and rewards. And as Joe continuously improves Fisher’s safety program, he emphasizes the value of research to understand core issues to avoid ‘organizational amnesia’. It is important to remember what has caused significant problems from the past.

Joe worked with Wheels to implement bi-annual MVR screenings and key fobs for all pool drivers to develop coaching scorecards and peer to peer analyses. He also revised their training manual supplementing it with in house training videos, updated telematics policies and defined remedial driving parameters such as .31 events/hour for harsh acceleration/braking and 1.5 events/hour for speeding. It is their goal to reduce the event frequency to .20 and he uses color coded data points as a tool when coaching drivers. In addition to event frequency, Fisher is also measuring crash severity through g-forces and seat belt use from the telematics devices.

Finally, Joe wants everyone to always wear seatbelts reminding us that we are only a click-away from a life altering event because seat belts are the primary defense to mitigate serious injuries.