If you are not analyzing the data from roadside inspections reports, you are missing out on a big opportunity to improve your fleet’s maintenance and repair operation.
As you know, Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s safety compliance and enforcement program. The goal, of course, is to prevent commercial vehicle crashes. Violations in the Maintenance BASIC account for a large percentage of overall CSA violations and cover brakes, lighting and tires.
There are many lessons that can be learned about your maintenance process and other aspects of your operation if you study the date from CSA violations. The most obvious is that you will be able to see failure trends among various components and then alter your maintenance schedule as needed in an attempt to prevent on-road failures or additional CSA violations.
Analyzing the data will also give you insight into the competency of your shops and those of any outside service providers you work with. For example, you will be able to see if one shop is overlooking something during brake inspections that might result in a larger number of CSA violations. Armed with this information, you can set up a training model for technicians to refresh their skills or speak to your outside service providers to make sure their technicians are properly trained.
You can also use the information to evaluate product durability and speak with manufacturers and suppliers about any components that you are seeing fail more frequently than you think they should. This could lead to some policy consideration and a discussion of what might be a better product fit for your application.
In addition, you can use CSA data to change your PMIs so that technicians will pay special attention to known failure areas. This should help them find problems before the truck is on the road where the failure could be spotted during a roadside inspection.
No maintenance system is 100% perfect, but using the data you are getting from your CSA violations can go a long way to reducing the number of violations in the future.
