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It has taken Derby time to bring the company's maintenance program up to a level he's satisfied with, but it's clear that he's still not satisfied.
"It wasn't proactive maintenance (when I started), which I think is what the company wanted to do when they brought me in," he explains. "Instead of firefighting—oh oh, something in the plant is leaking over here, a truck has a flat tire so we run over there—we wanted to build a foundation of proactive preventive maintenance, with a group of trained technicians with a mastermind behind it all. We wanted to take that as a template and take that to our Portage, IN operation and build one there, and then to our Rockford, IL location and build one there."
And the plans are big. The company recently leased a new section of the building they occupy, and Derby plans to turn it into a "drive-through" service area with portable lifts and a computer-inventoried parts room. The space is already in use, although it is, at present, not fully-equipped. The old single bay garage, meanwhile, is on the first stages of being converted to a trailer wash area.
With so much going on all at once, Derby realizes that if he had hired more technicians too quickly, he would not have been able to utilize them adequately.
"I think it would have been very hard if I had started this job six months ago and we would have hired four journeyman technicians right away. What do you do?" he says. "I had to build a foundation first; I had to build my knowledge of this company. It takes a little time to get the lay of the land and determine how many guys we need, and learn what's going on in Rockford and what's going on in Indiana, then bring all that back here and try to spit out the solutions."
TRAINING DAY
Because Derby hopes to hire technicians with 15 to 20 years of experience, he is not too worried about training his new hires. The company's training library consists of some Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) videos, and a growing file of "Unique Methods," detailed in-house procedurals that will eventually describe how to repair and maintain virtually every system and component on every vehicle and piece of equipment in the company.
"Say I get a new guy in in two weeks, and he's a pretty good hydraulic fitter, a pretty good diesel mechanic," Derby says. "If he's as good as he says he is, or he's a journeyman level, I can give him that sheet of paper and he can probably do that as well or better than I can."
