Outsourced Maintenance or In-House Maintenance?

[SterlingR]

10 years later and the contracts are still in place. I quit working there 8 years ago. The thing about maintenance contracts, you have to make the customer life easy. Take a part of his responsibilities away. The typical maintenance contract requires the customer to keep track of hours when services are due and then have to schedule with the dealer to get the service done. If you want to be successful with maintenance contracts get out of the box. I had two lube trucks and both trucks were generating $260,000.00 a year in a shop that billed $65.00 an hour. I would have taken 10 lube trucks over 10 service trucks. What is the next mistake a service manager does. He hires the $8.00 an hour guy to put in a lube truck. My highest paid man was in one of my lube trucks. You want these guy's finding anything that will cause the customer " unscheduled down time". I could talk on and on about maintenance contracts but I am not going to highjack this thread any longer. lol

 

[EMT]

Yaa know, I often wondered about the contracts. Do they work?, do they scare customers off? What good are they? Whats it do for us? How do you sell it?I love the idea of going the extra mile and take the customers mind off the pms.

 

[Heavy Highway]

This is an interesting discussion, relevant to my interests and current circumstance.

We trend more toward in house maintenance while outsourcing very little in a fleet of about 250 units, a mix of heavy equipment and trucks. The reason we do that is because....well, its how we always have. (certainly an absolutely awful answer but true nonetheless....long story, but I digress...)

This is something we are currently in the process of evaluating along with a significant number of other, hotter fires to put out, as it were. It may be something (outsourcing more service) we do out of neccessity because we currently have a backlog (literally a line) out the back of the shop.

I've been at the controls of the Equipment Manager position for 5 weeks now and there is much work to be done, evaluating whether or not we should increase our usage of outsourced service and maintenance being a top priority.

 

[EMT]

Wow, that is quite the fleet. We do a lot of work for Fed Ex and they outsource the time consuming projects to us. Fed Ex's major concern is the regular maintenances. Another thought is this, if you outsource your maintenance this will eliminate company time consuming work involved with maintaining equipment, parts, personel,shop details.
But there is always the other side of outsourcing ( bad customer service, high prices, unable to complete the work in a timly manor, goof ups)