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Case Study

How Roaring Fork Doubled PM Compliance And Reached Record Ridership Numbers

Industry
Fixed Route
Products
Enterprise Asset Management
A small agency with lofty goals — Roaring Fork doubled PM compliance and cut inventory discrepancies to keep more vehicles on the road and ridership numbers up.

Background

When Danny Knight, EAM and Fuel Focus Systems Administrator at Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA), sits down with his COO and Director of Planning these days, their meetings look a lot different than a year or two ago. For one, they’re shorter — because Knight has already quickly pulled reports before they even start, on things like inventory numbers and real-time mileage, data that used to take him hours to get, and when he did get it, there were often discrepancies.

There’s one other key difference in their meetings: he calls it concise communication, between finance, bus maintenance, asset maintenance, and every other division.

 

Challenges

One of Roaring Fork’s biggest challenges was compliance, with a capital C. At times, the locations of up to 25% of their revenue vehicles were not showing on their PM calendar. What this meant was buses in the wrong shops where they would miss service and wasted time for their shopkeepers and technicians.

Keeping track of mileage was another key concern. Because they were writing fuel tickets down by hand, there were discrepancies between what the vehicle was displaying and what the handwritten card said, so it was impossible to know their real-time mileage, and if that vehicle needed to be refueled before heading out.

“We used to just put data in the software and hope reports with good data would come out,” said Knight.

Solutions

This small transit agency had lofty goals — starting with improving their preventative maintenance (PM) compliance, making inventory tracking more accurate, and keeping their leadership informed with real-time data and reporting. They needed a tool that was already tailor-made for transit but also customizable to suit their needs.

Knight implemented Trapeze's Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system to start tackling these challenges. “The Trapeze system gives us the ability to mold it and shape it the way we want,” he said.

"I’m excited for the future of RFTA. We believe that Trapeze will be there to help move us in the direction of becoming a more efficient and transparent digital agency."

Danny Knight,
EAM and Fuel Focus Systems Administrator, Roaring Fork Transportation Authority

Results

Since implementing EAM, their PM compliance has already drastically improved, from 42% prior to EAM to 89% post-EAM. Knight attributes this to the digital tracking that EAM provides.

He said, “We know exactly where our buses are. Now, we track all our fueling digitally through EAM fuel tickets. We get mileage as soon as a bus is fueled, we know what it’s sitting at, its miles reading, hours readings, things we didn’t ever used to be able to track in real time. It keeps better track of our inventory and drastically helped with PM compliance.”

As a result, their inventory numbers “are about as tight as they’ve ever been,” said Knight. Before, they had 9-10% annual inventory discrepancies and since using EAM to track and manage inventory, it’s down to 2-3%. What this really means is that their finance team knows their inventory count is accurate so they can use this data for capital planning – without risk purchasing parts they don’t need or spending money where they don’t have to.

What Knight likes most is the concise communication between departments, especially with their building maintenance to track stationary assets. “Now, we have a nice concise line of here’s the problem, here’s the guy who requested the service or reported the problem, here’s the technician who solved it… We never used to be able to track this without people pulling 20 different pieces of paperwork or sending out six emails and getting only one reply.”

And at the end of the day, it’s making a huge impact at this agency. “Better PM compliance means more units staying on the road. If we’re doing preventative maintenance inspections, it means we’re getting buses out the door and making routes on time. A lot less deadheads and stand-ins. People are happier with the service – and to prove it, we’ve hit new ridership records for the last three years in a row,” said Knight.

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