Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
From Night Shifts to Management: A Journey of Success in Construction Industry
What could your career journey look like if you dedicated your life to product support in the construction industry? We sat down with Ron Wilson, a seasoned professional who climbed the ladder from working a night shift in a warehouse to becoming a field service manager. Ron shares a unique perspective on the evolving landscape of our industry, the importance of career growth, and the challenges we face in retaining the millennial workforce. His insights paint a vivid picture of success and resilience in an ever-changing field.
Retaining customers is key in our industry, and warranty management can make or break that relationship. Through discussions on job codes, standard times, and hearing firsthand accounts of warranty policies, we uncover the intricacies of this vital aspect of the construction business. We also share an intriguing tale of a dealership owner who went above and beyond, building a restaurant in his shop, to keep his customers happy. It's a testament to the fact that warranty is not just a policy - it is a promise of service.
No one said it was easy being a field service technician, but it's a job full of potential. We explore the nitty-gritty of technical training and the role of strong interpersonal skills in the industry. The balance between technical expertise and strong communication skills is a delicate one. Our discussions veer towards the younger generation, the potential they hold for our industry, and the critical role of giving them the right tools to succeed. From technician assessment to changes in dealership models, we offer engaging and practical insights. We hope this episode leaves you enlightened, inspired, and geared up to navigate the construction world with renewed drive!
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Aloha and welcome to another candid conversation. This morning we're joined by Ron Wilson, who's been in this industry almost as long as I have. He looks better too, by the way, but he's spent his whole life in product support, primarily in the caterpillar world. But, ron, good to see you. Young man, same here. Let's go a little backwards, if you will. Not very many people, I suspect, know you and your background, so tell us a little bit about what you've done over your career.
Speaker 2:Well, I started off at a caterpillar deer in 1980, and I actually was working night shift in the warehouse and my goal was to work there long enough to find a career. So I paid work at nine in the warehouse, paid the bills, paid the rent, groceries, food on the table kind of thing, and I did not expect to stay at a dealership very long. And then 23 years later I left the caterpillar world and went to work at a startup Cummins Kamatsu dealership and then moved back to Arizona working for the Kamatsu dealership there and then back to the cat to finish my career. I retired about two years ago. So I've been a great career, a great way to see how the industry has changed from the 1980s when I started and to where it is today and where it's going to go. I kind of wish I was a younger person that could kind of take that journey along the way, because it's very exciting what's happened over the time and what we can see going forward.
Speaker 1:I agree with you. Just a quick question I wonder how many people today that started on a night shift in a warehouse would progress through the industry like you have. Do we offer those same opportunities, do you think?
Speaker 2:I think the opportunities are there. I think the challenge is meeting the needs of the generation coming in that they're kind of like, may not planning to stay very long, may not know exactly what their path is, but they'll exit sooner than what I did. They won't stay long, they'll look for the first thing that comes up.
Speaker 2:I think a big difference for me is I had a career path early on where I wanted to accomplish. I had two or three positions I targeted in within the dealership at the level and then worked my path because I had to develop my own plan. There was not a plan there. They didn't do career path at that time, it was kind of on your own. When I went into so in 1980, I went in for the at that time I had physicals done at the dealership for you hired, you had to go to the doctor and have physical done, no matter what the role was.
Speaker 2:The guy says we don't have many people coming in here for this company at the dealership for the college degree. You're one of a few. It really kind of showed me that in that industry, in our industry at that time, college degrees, advanced education, was not really a key driver in success or promoting. It was something else. It was your job performance and doing well. My degree got me in the door and provided open my mind to other things besides just the day-to-day grind. That increased my curiosity about the industry and allow me to learn and grow from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, career paths even today are not that common and the younger folks and I don't blame them if they're not learning they're out of here and to some degree that explains in my mind anyways, why there's so many people that have eight and 10 and 12 jobs before they final sell down. When I went to university, ron, you've either took science or you took arts. Today the choices are immense and you're never really sure. I don't know at what point people can make a determination of a career. I'm suggesting now Guidance counselors in high school should be the best buddies of dealer, hr people and managers. Go find them, go have attended company days or employee days or whatever, and hire them when they're in high school. Yeah, saturday, sunday, one night a week or whatever. Just see if they like us, we like them, and then we can start charting a path for them. How did you move out of parts into getting involved in service?
Speaker 2:Well working on the part side and, of course, we had to work very closely on the service side. I just found the service side very exciting. It's just a constant change. Whatever you plan to date, that isn't going to happen. Something else is going to come up, so this machine is going to go down, and so it's kind of a combination of wanting to combine the challenge of service with parts. So that was kind of a career goal. So every evaluation I had, I want to get into service, I want to get into service, and there was an individual that provided me the opportunity to step in on the service side and my first role was to manage a field service operation, which is as a field service manager, which was a huge change for this dealership. You got a parts guy coming to run field service. What is this all about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, my best man was the service manager in Montreal and I was the parts manager in Montreal and we weren't happy with the relationship that the two departments had with each other. So we decided we were going to swap jobs. And it was the same response on the service who the heck's this guy? He doesn't know. So I put on overalls, went out, got pulled to wrenches and they told me get back in the office, you're screwing too much up. But it was guy. After I think it was about a year and a half, we went the other way and I teased them. I said that the gene pool in the service department was too shallow for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a blast. I'd get up the middle of night, go out on job site with the mechanics are working and same thing, put coveralls on and they take care of me, make sure I didn't get in the way and, the key thing, I didn't try to tell them how did their jobs. I didn't know how to do it. That really was not my role. I had a staff, some very strong technical people that knew how to fix machines, and my job was to mesh their knowledge and experience with objectives of the company and one of the key requirements I was expected to change the environment. We've got to take better care of the employees, work a lot of overtime, family issues at home being gone too long, customer demand, so find some different solutions. So we get away from doing how we've always done in the past.
Speaker 1:One of the things I find interesting in the path that you followed, and one that I support, is you were more the business guy than the technical guy, and I think all service managers in fact today I had leaders in just about any. I don't really care about your specific skills on the job over which you have responsibility, as much as it is how you can work with people and how you can motivate people to achieve the purpose or the goals, and not everybody knows what the hell we're supposed to do. I think we've done the poor job of communicating what we expect, and you mentioned performance reviews. Most people don't get performance reviews. Their bosses don't know how to do them, it's strange. So you wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago about making warranty a cost center. Why don't you touch on that a little bit, because I think that's a really important point that we miss.
Speaker 2:Well and so I didn't know much about the warranty side on the construction side but I was exposed to the warranty side on the automotive industry. That was interesting is that that is a revenue source for them. I get the chance to visit Sewell Cadillac in Texas, in Dallas, texas, along with a service manager I brought along to better understand how to take care of the customer better and also meet the needs of the organization. Warranty at that time was a very big thing. We're doing mostly on the BCP product for cat back of warranties, those kinds of things with a small clientele base. So got there and their approach to warranty is that it was to be managed as a business center. There were cost involved, cost monitoring involved. We had so many hours to do a job of whatever it was, managing the parts that had to go back to the warranty claim area and their approach was if service department, you have one opportunity to take care of that customer and after that the warranty department would address the rest. So if we dropped the ball on meeting the customer's needs and warranty, stepped in and made the decisions.
Speaker 2:So that took a different view to me on okay, well, how do we apply that within the construction business and the objective I took is that warranty the customer pays for warranty and the price of that machine or the buying extended warranty. They deserve every dollar they're entitled to as well, as a dealership is responsible to manage the cost of that. That goes back to the OEM. So trying to balance that too and making sure that the client gets what he deserves and that kind of put us to a different focus on customer service. Use warranty as a customer service Understand and to me this warranty and there's policy and the warranty side of it is know what's available. Your database has got to be current, so if you get one on this machine, this repair, while you're there, can you do another one to repair. That would take care of an issue that the client or customer may not be aware of yet but can also help them prevent a downtime further down the road. Remember what year that?
Speaker 1:was Ron.
Speaker 2:That was probably in the mid 80s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, carl's a special guy. His family had been in the car business for a long time. He wrote a book and you're probably aware of this, but customers for life. He did it with a Yale professor and he wrote the standards for General Motors anyways, on their customer service indices. He's a great guy and he's been all about forever the customer and nothing else matters to him. Do you know? He had a restaurant built in the middle of his shop?
Speaker 2:No, I did not.
Speaker 1:That would have been in the 90s, I guess. But he always had questionnaires for people, two or three things, tell us what you'd like. And they all said, well, we have to come in here do our service, but I have to miss lunch. So he put a cafeteria in the middle of his service department on the second floor. It was terrific, but everything he did was about customer service. It didn't matter whether it was an expense job, a policy job, a warranty job, a customer job, and his feeling was, if it's warranty, that requires, it deserves the highest priority of any work that they do. And I don't know that a lot of us have think that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd agree. I think very often that warranty is seen as it's kind of filler works. When things are slow, then you dust off the list of repairs needed to be done or are about to expire and then you go goes knocking on doors and that would be part of the everyday process. So if you can let a client know, hey, there's an update here, this is required, or you may not want to do it or whatever it is, but the information we can give them can help. They'll make better decisions and it builds trust. It builds confidence and, again, I really believe that they're entitled to that warranty and our job is to make sure that they get what they paid for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they just bought a new machine. They're excited about it, they're supposed to make money with it and darn it, it failed. We gave them something that was bad and fix it now, Don't screw around with it. It's a very different view. So, job codes, standard times how do you deal with? Or how did you deal with those?
Speaker 2:Well, the job code and standard time, those are extremely important. That on the catapult side, that dealership, they had that mapped out pretty good. I mean that was a very well, the focus was there and how that really helps not only the client and the dealer but it really helps the OEM. By property coding those they can go back and look at those, that repair history. We were even looking at meantime between repairs. So if you go out and do a one-three pair and you go back to the repair, go back out on that same machine and hey dealer, hey OEM, we've got this backhoe, for example, that we're out there every 10 or 15 hours and we've got to do something. So it's a really responsibility to help the customer. But it's kind of that linkage between the customer and the OEM on the future needs of manufacturing parts, replacements, whatever is involved with that. It's extremely important to utilize job codes and component codes.
Speaker 1:You're one of the few people, though, that got into life cycle management early, because what you're talking about is meantime between failure. You know what that machine's been here. We've got telematics, we've got sensors, we've got all kinds of technology today, but we still don't really get ahead of the curve saying, hey, wait a second, in another 30 days you need to swap that thing out, and I don't know that. Customers have come to that. Many have, but not all to understand that that's an important characteristic Replace it before it fails, because you're going to save money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially if you had on a repair and they do a walk around the machine and they could identify hey, your cutting edge is going to need to be replaced here within another week based on your using the application. You want to do it now, while we're down, or any of those kinds of things. So just going out and fixing that oil leak and then you leave, and now he's going to be down the following week to get the GT replaced. Those are the kind of things that that's kind of opening our vision. Looking around that machine and looking for the opportunities to that isn't really saving them anything. They're going to spend that money anyway, but it does cut down their downtime later on. That provides them more productivity and financial. They have some of the long run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things that I've always been nagging about is everybody compares the price of a part. They don't consider how much time it takes to put the part, replace the part, like cutting edges as an example. So I'm going to try and save five bucks, 10 bucks a set, 20 bucks, 50 bucks a set, and I'm down three weeks earlier and it takes me an hour to swap the edge. You know there's, there's not. There's more than just the price of the part and there's not that many people that think that way in the parts and service world. It's, and I think it's gotten worse. Ron, we've got a hell of a lot more information, but now it's almost. We're on automatic pilot. We process orders. We don't sell parts, we make repairs. We're like plumbers now and doctors we're. We don't try and avoid the repair. Need inspections, oil sampling, fluid analysis, all of those tools. Yeah, I don't know that many of us understand how they work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think some is driven because of the skill level we have in it with staff one and I think the the volume of work coming at us. So we try and skinny back the staff and so they're overworked, they don't have the time to do the analysis, our systems don't pull information and feed us reports that we can make decisions. So I think there's a lot of little pockets of issues that that prevents us from providing that kind of value back to our back to our customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, I call that paper to glass. We've taken manual procedures, forms et cetera and just put it on a computer screen and said we've, we've improved it, and I.
Speaker 1:I draw the parallel between when the electric engine arrived in the 1800s and replaced the steam engine. It took a generation of management before they, before they, use the electric engine the way it could be used. It's the same thing with us, with standard times, you know. Did you get into much what your effective labor rate was Like? I charge a hundred bucks an hour, but at the end of a month I look at the number hours I worked and I charged and it's 80 bucks an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did, and we got one point providing the field service technicians with their, with their own financial statement.
Speaker 1:And that's another thing that you wrote about which is, I believe, extremely important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it really drove that. The technician one. They're very competitive, very proud of what they do, and it also provided them a chance to understand the business side of that. So when you provide them a report, the shows are non-charge time and they understand non-charge time. Now we want to make sure that they're not penalized on training and and help they gave on coaching another technician. Make sure we pull those kinds of things out so they're not penalized because they will feel penalized.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's perceived as being negative, but those kinds of things really provides a technician to better manage their own time. If you're about to finish wrap up on a job, then you call and say I'll be done in 30 minutes, whatever it is, I'm ready for the next one, so we're not losing time. Between he wraps all up, cleans up the truck and the machine's ready, and then he calls Well, now let's scramble and see where can we put you in the next two hours left on your shift. So they, they, they learn little things that can help the, the office staff, schedule their time. That makes them more effective as well.
Speaker 1:What do you think about giving the men responsibility for invoicing? So that field service guy you're talking about he's wrapped up the job, he's communicated to the customer. I'd like to have him print an invoice and give it to the customer right down in there. That a good idea or a bad idea?
Speaker 2:I think it's a good idea if you get the right flat rates and the mentality. What I've seen, though, is how some labor jobs will become inflated, so they'll add a little bit more time here, a little bit more time there to where it is safe, not understanding that being safe is we're losing business on the other end, because we've become, with an inflated flat rate.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:As long as those things are in there. But I think there's no reason we can't get down to a flat rate in a percentage part of the jobs, getting down to where they're not having to enter time when you get back to the office. Let's get the time enter now, so where it really can be as close to immediate billing as possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. The other side of that is, I like to, with flat rates and if we have confidence in them, I like to give the man eight hours in the shop first, eight hours of labor at the beginning of the day and say, okay, this is your job today. I've gone so far with some of the technicians, based on their quality, to say, okay, when you're finished, you can go home or come back. I'll give you more work and I'll pay you more. Good idea or bad idea.
Speaker 2:Wow, that would be a change for this industry. What I have seen is those the technicians working the automotive industry the burnout rate for those guys because that flat rate that eats their lunch, yeah. So we've seen them move from the automotive industry coming to our industry because we're not quite tightly controlled on their flat rates and there's so many things they can't control parts availability and getting parts to the Bay and I've got to go back into approval for this because there's somebody else is not available to approve it or those kinds of things that eats up their time. So as long as that process works well, it's a win-win for everybody. But we as a dealership need to learn to better understand how can you apply those flat rates more effectively and not just add to the cost, but remove those obstacles, remove those barriers to a good honest. I don't mean honest, not, we're dishonest, but we just get where we inflate things that we really shouldn't be. It wasn't intended for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:One of the things that people lose sight of. A flat rate, a standard time, is not an average time. Jobs don't work. Your man grounded in a river of average depth of one foot, congratulations. But I'd like to put in one deviation if I want to talk about mathematics, so I add 15 percent to the average time and that's my standard time. If you go beyond that, 118, if you will, so it's 10 hours. I give you 11 hours and eight minutes, or 80 minutes, 11.8 hours. If you can't get it done in 11.8, I got a problem. But we never go, we never pad. It's 11.8 and I can give you a bill right now before you start the job, and it's all over. But you're right about parts. Do your men order parts from the bay on a laptop using an electronic catalog and shopping cart?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really the way to go. To me. The shop is much easier on doing those flat rates, no question. The last one that was in was on. We manage flat rate on rebuild. Have an engine rebuild.
Speaker 2:We provided three levels of rebuild to the client. It was a firm price upfront, so this is what's included into that. Now that's agreed upon between the service side and our repair history. We've had in the past the parts list that will be used and utilizing repair use guidelines at CatHavs to make those decisions Before we start the job. It's a level one, two or three rebuild and that is your price. Now, anything above that, if it's the crank has scored or something else, that's an add-on and we'll get to that as it occurs Now.
Speaker 2:I think that provides confidence with the customers. Some of the larger customers have a lot of that made it easier for them to do business with us as compared to others. That well, there's always a surprise. Well, we got to stop the job because you got to approve this. We got to stop that because we had approval for this. We saw the larger clients really actually going to that concept and it kept their machine rebuilds moving quickly. They knew what their bill was going to be at the end and it built confidence and trust with the dealership, the customer, the dealership, the client and the technicians.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's quite a deal. The electronic catalog technicians ordering parts from the bay, a lot of parts guys push back saying there's going to be a lot more returns. You got any thinking on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think if you can provide the grocery list of this, this is the rebuild and these are the parts that they are pre-ordered. So you're going to do an engine rebuild. It's a level one. Here's the parts list. The technician doesn't need to enter anything. Those parts show up based on the level one. Now if there's something outside that, so then he's only looking for a, you'd use the 80-20 rule. He's only looking for 10-20 percent of the parts that's not on the list because it's outside of scope. So I think that's really making that efficient is use your past history and get those flat rates where parts and labor really fine-tune and honed in for consistency sake. And then the technician is not entering parts very often, except there's more of an exception than there is the rule.
Speaker 1:Right, the parts that are on that original delivery, the 80 percent, let's call it. You use those parts irrespective of the condition or the part that was there before, correct? Yes, you use 100 percent of time. Yeah, automotive makes it look a lot easier because they time maintenance much more tightly to their cars than we do with our machines. Talk to me a little bit about maintenance. Should we have a different price for maintenance work than we do for repair work?
Speaker 2:I think we should. From a dealership perspective, our challenge is utilization of technicians.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're a dealership that isn't large enough to have a separate lube team versus field service team versus troubleshooters, you have a mix that you're pulling from constantly all the time. So this morning you'll have your top troubleshooting technician out troubleshooting a hydraulic electrical issue, but in the afternoon it's changing oil. Well, that really makes it hard to get a highly compensated technician, highly skill level technician, but yet he's changing oil and services. So if you can manage that, it has to manage with the scope of the repair. So I think the dealerships have more to learn about how to do that and utilize that variable labor rate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm with that 100 percent. The other thing that we don't really have I don't know if you've seen it, but we have an assessment for construction industry technicians. Four sections engines, powertrain, hydraulic, electrical 40 questions in each and we get a score. So I'm one of the guys that believes in an ABC type of skill set and I also believe in matching the jobs on an ABC degree of difficulty. So I've got guys that are A's and if I put them on a C job I'm losing my butt because I can't recover their expense. I can't put a guy who's got C skills on an A job, so it becomes a much more difficult scheduling task. But service managers tend to do that in their head today and I don't know how that. I never understood that. I don't know how to do that. I'm not that smart.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we see the pants as the dispatcher really the dispatcher. Well, we can send this guy. He can do this job. Well, I don't know, we ought to send this guy, we this maybe? Yeah, we better not do that, or well, I have no choice, we got to send him and we'll just have to do what we got to do. But I think having that certification or evaluation done to where you get your different levels of technicians and your attempt is to sign the job within that scope of work for them, that matches, and you get a sign by helper or they have someone they can call if they get into a bind. But, yeah, that's part of the career path for technicians that is extremely important. Doing their assessments, both on the Azure assessment and then also the on-hands portion of it. Yeah, that really can go a long ways. That we could connect it back to assigning of their job assignments too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it also. I think one of the things that I'd like to see is in the old days we used to have an apprentice or a helper for about every two technicians. I think we've lost that a little bit. That's kind of the mentor that you know, the old-fashioned apprentice where you're going to work with the guy for a while. I think that helps people both sides. The experienced guy I think it leverages his time more effectively and the young guy starts seeing work habits and approaches to life and I think we've missed that a lot. Was that still in use at your previous employers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, assigning apprentices absolutely. And the challenge we're getting into is that we are doing so many apprentice training as well. How many apprentices can you take on? How many apprentices can you if you get a think big class, for example, or it could be the Kamatsu think big class, but you've got a class graduating, you're about to put 20 new apprentices into the program?
Speaker 2:How many can you put in that shop and not impact the number of hours on the job or quality work, or so you kind of get into how do we balance the number of people we have but assigning those apprentices and it needs to go beyond their skill set of just turning wrenches. I really think we do what I call silo training, where we'll teach them how to do an engine rebuild but we don't teach them work ethic or we don't teach them other things that they need to do. Instead of providing a complete training program that includes that wraps in safety, that it wraps in your work habits and wraps in your technical skills to provide a well balanced employee, we'll sign an entry level technician to a really good, sharp technician but his desire is not to teach them work ethic and desire is it's really on how to turn wrenches and it really needs to be a balanced training program.
Speaker 1:That's been one of my criticisms for a long time, that we send them to technical schools. We do a real good job in trying to get them technical skills, but you know that you don't just wrap them in plastic and say, boy, they're really good pulling wrenches, they're good dice, not stations, but they can't talk to each other. You know interpersonal skills, communication skills under business skills, understanding a financial statement, like you say, giving each man. Just imagine that they're their own businessman and you give them a financial report on their performance for the month and allow them to make the judgment. I think that's powerful as hell, ron, and I don't know very many product support executives, leaders, that have done that. I think it's a wonderful idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had one technician I remember he was. He was. We also measured their age and their whip. Yeah, he had a working process and we measured that as well. And one of the technicians very highly skilled technician, very sharp in their long time. He came out on his performance for the month of very low in whip turns and it just broke his heart. He said I'll never be there again. We walked through it. What's the issue? Well, you're not getting your service reports turned in on time. They're waiting for parts credits to come back. We can't find your warranty cores. So we working through that, we're able to process his work orders quicker and but those are things that a technician, they're off the next job. I mean, if you haven't got that locked down when they finish that job, you'll never find those parts again. You won't find the cores again and you're fighting the battle of where does the where do the dollars go? So yeah, it can be very successful.
Speaker 1:Most service managers. This is a bad statement, but most service managers are more interested in getting the machine back to the customer so they can get back to work than they are in cutting an invoice. The invoice is secondary. You know, just for for grins, if I've got a field job, how many days from the time the job is complete should it be before I have the invoice in the mail?
Speaker 2:Yep, Is it days, weeks, months?
Speaker 1:what.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, if you get down to hours, really, how many hours does it get that invoice done? That's really the goal is to get to is get that into the hand of the client. They're more likely to pay that invoice the closer it is to the timer of the repair. Then if they're having to wait 15, 20, 30 days and now, then they're thinking I wouldn't know what happened with that thing. Well, by the way, we've got another issue with that. Because of that invoice you did or they're repair you do, you got to come back and fix that first.
Speaker 2:So we have one of the first jobs in in the when it became the field service manager, there was a client disputing a bill. It was fairly large, I'm guessing around some around $10,000. Disputing the bill. He was a COD customer from out of the territory. So I met with my, my buzz, the director of services. I'm going to send this guy a letter and I said okay, I've reviewed it.
Speaker 2:Here's what I think happened. You, you send me a check, whatever you think is fair. And that man says we'll never see that money. And so he is. I sent the letter. All time this is back before. Emails are very popular, so it took a lot to get the mail going, that kind of stuff, but. But he sent back a letter with a check for the full amount and he said you know, I've never had anyone ever asked me well, you pay what you think it's worth. And it gave me an explanation what you guys actually did. Not only will I pay the bill, but I will use you guys again, yeah, so, so I think being fair and honest and asking the customer, but but it isn't always about Pay this or pay that, or write this off, write that off. It's just sharing of information, having confidence and trust in each other.
Speaker 1:I have two fundamental rules wrong, and you might have heard me talk about that in parts, every part. Every customer or mechanic orders today. I want to find today and get back to the customer, and and hardly anybody does that because it's a lot of work. But, similarly, any job that is completed today, I want to be invoiced today and I get pushed back like you wouldn't believe. Parts haven't been returned. Well, wait a second. The job's not completed until the parts of service our ports not done.
Speaker 1:Don't give me this nonsense. It's, it's expectations, I think, and we've had too many people, too many mechanics are setting their own expectations, not the company, and that's, that's a customer service issue. We got to be consistent. You know, driving down the road, you see it, danny, say well, I'm not gonna die, I'll go in, is your first choice? Not necessarily, but it's there, you know it's, it's it. And today, with all the technology, with all of the intelligence and and this is a bit of a contradiction Our schools aren't delivering the same kind of product to the universities that they used to. But We've got younger. People are significantly smarter than we were at their age. They've been exposed to so many more things, yet we treat them like mushrooms. Here's the job. I'm gonna show you how to do the job. Watch me do it. I'm gonna talk about it. This is what I showed you. Now you try it and I'll watch. And you know, it's kind of like they. They can park their brains at the door. They don't need to think about how they do things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and given them the tools. If you look at hydraulic cylinders, for example, of hydraulic parts or exchange parts, doing the core inspection to determine the core value to turn what kind of credit you issue back, well, let's just do that ahead of time. If you have a good hydroglyce cylinders and cats pretty good at it, and so is on the commons you side. You have reused guidelines. A price Counterperson with no hydraulic experience can utilize those core inspection guidelines. Use the guidelines, cut the core credit and move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:You're not waiting for the cylinder to go back to the shop and you got to find time to disassemble it and inspect it. Now You've taken a time on the technician. Where do the hours go? You got to put it back together to send it back. To cap, use the guidelines, use the information available and they can make the right decision if they have the right tools.
Speaker 1:If here's a little bit. You were with a commons dealer for a while, correct? Yes their approach on repairs is different than our reports on construction equipment. They look at an engine, they do a diagnostic, they do a fix and then they keep, they keep on going. So they don't really have a fixed price at the beginning. It kind of evolves. Is that your understanding as well?
Speaker 2:Well, if that dealership, it was a commons dealer that had acquired a Kamatsu dealership and Part of.
Speaker 2:California. Yeah, my role was to come in as a general service manager and start up the, the service side on the Kamatsu side. So so there was a really interesting, as we know on highway truck businesses a lot different than the equipment business, so you're, you have a and sometimes those don't mesh very well. So so walking into a commons dealer and adapting the tractor side of the business. So we have some learning to do. It really was a really good dealership, the, the dealer principles and they've sold the commons dealer now, but very first-class people, good customer service skills on there on the common side because they're they're been in the territory very, very long time very well respected. So my role was more of Implementing the, the Kamatsu side, within the Cummins Cummins network that they had.
Speaker 1:What did you take from the Cummins side Back to the Kamatsu world?
Speaker 2:Well the well. The first thing I was really surprised at is their brand, their structure. They had their branch manager. They were all service people or the branch managers, which was interesting now that I think about it. But their responsibility included parts service and sales, and they're required to have a monthly meeting between part service and sales. Client issues is going on. How are we doing as a store overall? So I really, whereas from the, from the, the caterpillar side, where I came from, parks as parks and labor's labor and sales as sales, and they didn't get in the room together very often. So it was very refreshing to see the effort being made to pull parts, the dealership together to work through customer issues and we're common goals and moving forward, as I was very, very impressed with their approach on Combining the efforts and communicating it back out to the, to the teams your comment about the ownership of that dealership is really valid.
Speaker 1:They were first-class people. There were customer service people and you know, on highway business is very different. A lot of its transient customers and I remember working with some customers here commit commons dealers, specifically at showers. They had places where the drivers could could sleep. You know, it's a, it's a very. It's much more customer centric Than the construction world. We've got most of the on highway truckers, the drivers owners. I can't remember the exact statistic but it's well, more than 50% of the on highway truck Businesses they're independent contractors. Yeah, they don't work for somebody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's some big companies.
Speaker 1:But most of them are independent, and that's why it's kind of interesting. What do you think about electrification of equipment? Good idea, bad idea?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's a good idea. I think it. I think our challenge is is the transitioning from what we have today to the electric side, and I think we're the. My opinion, the dealers are really way behind on getting that transition done. It's gonna happen fast, it's happening fast. So, and I think there's a there's a fear on the technician side and Working on the electric product. It shouldn't be, but we've got to do a better job. And power system side, probably no doubt for way farther ahead on most dealers.
Speaker 2:If you can work on the catch line or coming cider, you know they've, we have the knowledge and expertise on how to work around electrified stuff. Well, let's take and transfer that knowledge to the machinery technicians. But they, it's coming, it's here. I think we just need to Need learn how to use it. I do think it's going to change the model of the dealerships. Yeah, I count the number of engine rebuilds you're going to have. I mean that's some of the auto dealers are facing that now and and all in the in the recent union agreement, union agreements with Ford and the other OEMs there. How do we handle people? You know we don't need as many people assembly engines now, or or transmissions or whatever it is. So it's really going to change the structure of the dealership network overall and and I think the sooner we get on that and understand it and apply the principles of a change to that, the better off will be.
Speaker 1:We're quite a bit behind, aren't we? We haven't kept up with the changes in technology, and her we, really we don't. One of the things I admire about Japan is Kaizen, where everybody is conditioned To try and do things better every day, every week, every month. We we tend not to to think that way, yeah, and so here comes a electrification or hydrogen or whatever the different fuel packs going to be Compared to a gasoline or diesel internal combustion engine. It's a different world, and and that also challenge, you know, the supply chain might get interesting too, because who's gonna?
Speaker 1:You know, if you look at cars, the automotive companies Ford is an example came out at the beginning of this year Saying we have a different contract for electric dealerships. You will not have any inventory. We will ship from the factory to the customer. We will allow the customer to make up their machine on our website and we'll ship it to them directly. So it becomes a question who's gonna be the one that looks after the customer, the dealer or the OEM? And that's starting to blur In the construction world. Our equipment is so damn expensive. You need to be a very wealthy dealership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard to become a dealer anymore. It's almost next to impossible as a private owner. Large corporations can but financially, it's very, very tough to start a dealership. Yeah, in fact, what you, what you're saying, is absolutely true. What were when I started in?
Speaker 1:1969 there were 10 dealers in Canada. There's two today. There were 50 dealers in the United States and and cat is an hour that of huge amount of money that's been spent on the car. I must have humongous dealers, multiple billions of dollars. But that's the amount of volume you need. If you need, if you want to have the capital assets, the inventory you require, those machines. D8 used to be under a hundred thousand when I started. You know People laugh at me when I make that kind of comment. Where to start the 1600s, you know, but it's, it's, it's nuts, the um, the differentiation anymore from one brand to the other. We've had different standard times. We've had different bills of materials. We've had different job code structures. We had different telematics approaches. Now there's third-party software on just about anything. What impact do you think that's going to have on the quote? Traditional OEM dealer.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's a real disadvantage to the dealer because they lose the data. Now that third-party access, unless the owner of the equipment allows you to have access to that, they won't have the information on scheduling, pm services, operating hours, locations. I mean it's really a disadvantage. So that it's just so important to those dealers that whoever they're working with as their own internal team or real vendor is, they've got to understand the importance of the telematics part of that and the role it plays. Then make sure the customer feels comfortable that it's not to be used against them. It's a sharing of information to be used properly. But yeah, that's a very that can to me, be a very big shortcoming for a dealership is not having access to that information.
Speaker 1:Then, at the same time, how often did you have a customer that was exclusively one brand? Yes, rarely, and it's getting worse, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:As a result of that, if I'm going out and I'm the catapular dealer, the deer dealer, the Volvo, whatever to the customer and he has two of my machines, that's cool, but he's got 18 other machines, why does he have to deal with four people? Why can't we go in and look after everything for them? That's the other side of the coin, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is. In a lot of cases, like on the Kamatsu side, you can use the cat product on their own. Some items. You can't get into everything, but yeah, that's a big thing. The other thing is we're seeing a lot of the newer technology. Now they're having to upgrade and it is massive. I mean, when you get your what are your platform is using whether it be a Kamatsu or the cat unit and you've got to go in and replace that unit because it is now obsolete and you've got a couple of thousand units out there and at this date it becomes dark. You can no longer read the data you start thinking about. Whose expense is that? Is that the OEMs? Is it the clients? Is it the dealership? That's a huge expense on those kind of conversions and that's not going away. That's going to become, continue to be, a major issue.
Speaker 1:I think we're moving into what I call the subscription services era, where it's like your phone you get updates. Whether it's an Apple or a Samsung or whatever brand doesn't matter. You get software updates pretty regularly and Apple just announced a huge security update. That because they made a mistake on one of their software updates. So security becomes an issue because those machines now somebody can drive by and can track into it. Just like somebody can see where you are in your car, somebody can track where you are with your phone.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're walking into a different world, aren't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I agree with you. It's exciting. I wish I was 20 again starting up, but we've seen a lot of change, but the change that's coming in the next 10, 20 years is going to be even more dramatic, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so, and very exciting. You know, artificial intelligence where it's going, what it can be used for, how to apply it, how it can make our jobs easier, how it can help train employees sooner. So, yeah, I think it's just very exciting. Data analytics I think we've just slowly beginning to use data analytics within our business operations to help identify potential clients when machines do for replacement, pulling all this data together and doing something with it. One of my roles was in I was assigned a marketing and my goal was to start the data analytics portion of the leadership within marketing. So you had the separate marketing. One is to the traditional marketing, the flyers and brochures and events and those kinds of things and mine was to take all of the data points within the leadership and how do you learn to apply it to better market to our clients and use it internally within the business to make better business decisions?
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of our associates, Steve Cleggs the man's name. He's a pretty intelligent guy. He has a company called Centoro that does data analytics using artificial intelligence on market coverage and he takes transactions. He's not interested in dollars, he takes transactions and one of the measures that comes out is customer defections and the conditions that lead to defections and the change in buying patterns that we never even dreamt of back 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago. But with that, like you're saying, hey, wait a second, that machine now is costing you $17 and operating hours should be six. Let's replace it. And we've got so many things like that. Similarly with technology, now, any change on a work order, a text goes out to the customer. We completed this labor piece. We found new stuff. Here's a quote for that. All of that stuff is instantaneous. And remember the old days we couldn't ever get in touch with the customers. We started giving them pagers so that we knew where they were, so they respond to us. A text message gets across a hell of a lot faster than a phone call.
Speaker 2:It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:So, ron, I think we've covered things. Looks like you've frozen up a little bit on the internet. There we are.
Speaker 2:There we go. Okay, still there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's one of the beautiful things about coming across the ocean. Before I get to you, I got 2,500 miles of water. I think we've covered a fair amount of ground on this, from the financial statements to what goes on with the new technicians that builds the material to standard time and all the rest of it. On census, it's a pleasure. Have you got any parting words of wisdom that you'd like to share with the audience as to what a product support leader needs today?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's always be a challenge. Be sure and be partners with the sales side, the rental side, because they're part of the team, as well as be partners with the finance side and the internal pieces of that dealership, because it takes everyone hitting on all cylinders in order to be effective in the overall roles. The clients they may not always be right, but they're always first.
Speaker 1:Yep, that's a good way of saying it too. Thank you very much, Mr Wilson.
Speaker 2:And thank all of you who've been listening.
Speaker 1:We look forward to having you with another candidate conversation in the near future. Mahalo, thank you.
