To spec a truck the right way, the trouble lies in balancing needs against desires — since those don’t always align. Working with a third-party expert like Ryder will help you find the right balance, where every component is working for you instead of creating problems down the road.

To spec a truck the right way, the trouble lies in balancing needs against desires — since those don’t always align. Working with a third-party expert like Ryder will help you find the right balance, where every component is working for you instead of creating problems down the road.

Spec’ing a truck today is not as simple as thinking about gross vehicle weight, suspension and powertrain. Today, there’s a long list of features and emissions requirements that fleets need to consider. To spec the right way, fleet managers need to understand how their vehicles will operate within their business application, including driver needs and skills, delivery schedules and routes, terrain, and a host of other factors. This means asking a lot of questions about your fleet — a list that constantly changes with every new piece of technology.

The goal for most fleets, however, doesn’t change: spec each truck for maximum performance and efficiency. To reach this goal, the best solution is to work with experts who make it their business to stay on top of new products and technology. A true expert in the field, Art Trahan, Senior Manager of Technical Support for National Accounts at Ryder System Inc., has been with Ryder for more than 38 years. Trahan started his career with the company as a maintenance technician and has taken on many other roles, expanding his expertise in areas ranging from environmental requirements to fleet and maintenance management.

When Trahan begins working with a fleet, there are several tried and true steps he takes to pinpoint every possible need each truck requires. That’s because there’s no easy “kit” a fleet can pick from to get the perfect truck. Any expert from Ryder knows every truck needs customization because there’s no universal spec’ing solution. But the trouble lies in balancing a fleet’s needs against desires — since those don’t always align. Working instead with a third-party expert like Ryder will help you find the right balance, where every component is working for you instead of creating problems down the road.

Where the Work Begins

“What needs to happen early on in the process is a very good needs assessment,” Trahan says. “You start asking every question you can imagine from ‘what’s the gross vehicle weight,’ to ‘what area of the country you’re operating in.’” Area of operation, for example, affects multiple aspects of truck specs, from type of powertrain and number of gears to whether or not the truck needs to be CARB compliant.

Using food distribution fleets as an example, not only is there a lot to consider on the tractor but the trailer as well. You need to understand the complexities of your fleet’s delivery system from knowing how much frozen versus fresh food is delivered, how much time there is between deliveries, length of time spent at a customer’s location and how long the door will be open, and so on. “All those play into how you size the refrigeration unit to hold that temperature that the customer must have on their product,” Trahan says, adding that Ryder has provided integrated source-to-shelf supply chain solutions to top food and beverage companies worldwide for nearly 80 years.

A question fleets often have a difficult time answering is whether performance or fuel economy takes priority. “Some of the questions are dynamically opposed,” Trahan says. “If you go to a customer and they say, ‘I want to get the best fuel economy that I can, but I want to run very high road speeds’ — you have a problem.” But that’s where expertise comes in. Ryder can help prioritize these needs versus desires for customers and find the best balance for the application.

In addition to hundreds of thousands of miles of data from customers, Ryder has its own fleet in which the company is constantly testing and monitoring new features like collision avoidance systems or automated manual transmissions. Knowing what the results will be on the road when sacrificing one spec for another and with any type of feature in place, Trahan is able to show customers different real-world scenarios depending on each spec’ing decision. “We can actually show you where it makes a good business case to have that collision avoidance system, and what it does as far as reducing the number of rear-end collisions, for example,” he adds. “We don’t just walk in and say, ‘this will work.’ We walk in and say, ‘I can show you how this worked.’”

Running through his many questions with the customer, Trahan says it’s important to prioritize every spec. But what he often notices, and the reality of most fleet owners, is that they don’t always know the answers to all his questions and what their trucks are really doing on a daily basis. “What happens more often than not is they have a broad brush stroke, if you will, as to what it is they want to do,” he says. It’s in figuring out these questions and how to work through them that Ryder helps customers unlock the best spec.

Think Beyond Acquisition Cost

Another challenge that Trahan works through with a lot of fleets is their tendency to gravitate toward the lowest acquisition cost. “Some of the features that we could add to the vehicle might add cost, but they also improve efficiency. So in the long run the fleet is going to come out ahead as far as return on investment and the bottom line, all because we’ve customized that piece of equipment — opposed to seeking out the lowest cost of acquisition,” he explains.

Looking narrowly at the lowest cost of acquisition also tends to give fleets a very generic truck. From Ryder’s perspective, that’s the type of spec a fleet starts out with in the process, not ends up with. “With things like collision avoidance systems, automated transmissions, backup cameras, lane departure warning systems — and the list goes on and on of features available to the customers — many fleets don’t know fully what they are and the fact that they’re available in trucks. So we take the time to explain to them what the feature is and what the benefit is for them,” Trahan says.

If not spec’d properly, there are a number of potential problems fleets could face throughout the truck’s life, if not immediately. For example, if a fleet tries to spec trucks based purely on fuel economy, and then tries to pull through a mountainous area, the likelihood of driver complaints that the trucks are lacking power will be high.

“We make a point to understand what it is that the fleet is going to do with the vehicle down to every detail, and what their expectations are of the vehicle,” Trahan says. “Then you can match up the vehicle’s specifications and customize it to meet their needs and expectations. Often fleets don’t know how to drill down and really find out what they’re going to use the equipment for, which opens the door to a bad spec’ing job.”

As the largest commercial vehicle purchaser in North America and with a fleet of more than 200,000 vehicles, Ryder’s ability to custom-spec vehicles is unparalleled. The company’s relationships with every major OEM means Ryder can influence future vehicle designs based on its extensive experience managing truck fleets across almost every class and application. OEMs also look to Ryder as a proving ground for new technology, deploying vehicles in the company’s test fleet for analysis and feedback.

“When you sit in a meeting at Ryder, and you listen to some of the tenure and the history that our folks have, it’s clear that we’ve been at this for quite some time,” Trahan says, adding that by staying a step ahead of the industry, Ryder can help mold new features still in development by OEMs and other vendors. “You name the cargo, and we have probably designed a vehicle to haul that product. We’re not a fleet, we are a group of fleets, so just about any vehicle you can imagine, Ryder can build that, and in building that we can customize each vehicle to meet customer needs.”

And that’s the value of working with an expert — you gain veteran knowledge as if it were your own.

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