Two providers of truck maintenance services that are both owned by Cox Automotive but are significantly different in how they provide their offerings are being pulled together as one organization, Cox has announced.
Fleet Services and FleetNet America will be merged into one Cox subsidiary effective January 1. “This strategic alignment represents a major step forward in Cox Automotive’s long-term commitment to the fleet industry,” the company said in a prepared statement.
Patrick Brennan, the senior vice president of Fleet Services at Cox, said in an interview with FreightWaves that Fleet Services and FleetNet may both be targeted toward truck maintenance but the models take different approaches toward their customers.
FleetServices, he said, was built from a “group of smaller companies that we acquired in the last five or six years that are focused on first-party technical services and mechanical services, mostly on site.”
Full-time workers at Fleet Services
There are about 1,500 technicians in Fleet Services, Brennan said, who are full-time employees. Most of them travel to physical sites of FleetServices clients and perform various maintenance tasks. The number who travel and do on-site repairs is about 1,200.
The remaining approximately 300, Brennan said, work in any of the roughly 30 “brick and mortar” facilities dotted around the country.
Fleet Services also is a retailer of Great Dane trailers, Brennan said.
Brennan described FleetNet as a “third party facilitator between the fleet operators and the fleet service providers.” That network totals about 65,000 he said. They are vetted providers of various maintenance services that a user of the FleetNet network can tap into for their needs, which he said focuses heavily on roadside assistance.
“We are one of the first calls that the fleets make to try to facilitate having a service provider come out there and get them back up and running as quickly as possible,” Brennan said. “The majority of what they do is roadside recovery work, but they also do scheduled work as well.”
Becoming a FleetNet provider
The providers in the FleetNet network need to provide various evidence of such things as insurance. After that, Brennan said, they will be placed in the network.
But once in as a FleetNet provider, Brennan said the companies on the list “absolutely have to meet the standards of performance, or they can drop down the rankings pretty quickly with regard to whether they’re going to be chosen for that next job.”
He added that they range from “a small single mom and pop garage to a really, really large provider.”
Brennan said the FleetNet group also does managed care, which is a planning program to keep a customer’s fleet on a regular maintenance schedule.
Given two companies that while both are involved in maintenance are otherwise different in their approach to providing it, what is the point of bringing them together?
There is overlap, Brennan said, with trucking companies that are clients of both operations. “They look to us for a full solution, whether it be roadside recovery, which one wants to prevent as much as possible, and we can do that through preventive maintenance,” he said.
But there are other practical considerations. For example, Brennan said the pool of 1,500 technicians at Fleet Services do not have a national footprint. Combining FleetServices and FleetNet will allow customers to make one phone call, as Brennan put it, and tap into either the Fleet Services network of the company’s full-time technicians if it’s available or get routed into the FleetNet network.
“We feel the two together really, really makes a great, powerful combination to meet the needs of that of that fleet operator, whether they’re a small HVAC company in Atlanta or Dallas or they’re a national brand that’s going to need all sorts of different initiatives that we ought to be able to bring a solution to,” Brennan said.
Joint billing for the overlapping services also provides a broader centralization of data on the maintenance history of a fleet, Brennan said. “We’re seeing their maintenance holistically, and we ought to be able to sit down and give them a really robust solution that looks across their needs and really meets them,” he added.
The hunt for diesel mechanics
Given what it does, Fleet Services is constantly searching for diesel technicians to become employees.
Brennan conceded “it’s not the easiest thing to find technicians when we need them.” But he said recent efforts have been “very successful,” with a particular emphasis on hiring members of the armed services leaving the military.
Fleet Services does have an onsite training program in Indianapolis, FleeTec Academy. It’s a five-week all-expenses paid training program. “We bring them through a very extensive introduction and development phase to get them introduced to the industry, and we’ve been able to source quite a few that way as well,” Brennan said.
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