Pre and Post Trip Inspections Can Help Lower Operating Costs

While CSA regulations can seem rigorous, conforming to them can actually help you to lower your fleet’s operational costs. Following guidelines on pre and post trip inspections, for example, can save your operation time and money. Consider this example:

A trucking company based in San Jose recently received an out of service violation for a headlamp that had burned out. The fleet manager who received the call spent an hour looking for a mechanic who was willing to perform an immediate road call. At $75 an hour, the mechanic took three hours to locate a replacement part, drive it to the truck’s location and install it. He also charged the company a $50 mobile service fee. So the company paid $275 for a $6 headlamp (and that cost doesn’t include downtime and the fleet manager’s time).

If the broken headlamp had been noticed during a pre trip inspection, the company would have saved $269 and four hours of time. This is a perfect example of how pre and post trip inspections can minimize downtime and save money.

To read Paul Backers’s (CTP) white paper, “Conforming to CSA Regulations While Reducing Operating Costs with Pre and Post Trip Inspections,” visit http://www.petersontrucks.com/papers/pre_trip_inspections.