Pre-Trip or Vehicle Inspection Improved? CayCan Safety's Kris Fulgham Discusses

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Transcript

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And welcome to another Dawg On-It Trucking Pawedcast. My guest this week is a fellow entrepreneur, Kris, welcome to the show. And tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi, good morning. Thank you very much for having me. My name obviously is another Chris. I spotlight in the proper way, but we can cross that bridge later. I am a certified third-party auditor out here in Alberta. So basically if your carrier profile, it gets enough points on it. Oh, here in Alberta, you get a letter saying that you need to have an audit done and it needs to be done by one of these people. My name is on that list. So I've been doing that for so many years. Kay. Cat and safety has been running for over 20 years in this business, taking care of the carriers. There goes my daughter, of course, probably restart. And that's the beauty of actually doing these interviews in your home. So yeah, we're, we're a transportation safety compliance company out here in Alberta. So we do the national safety code audits as well as we try to do all of the consulting services to help a carrier before they get into an audit. So obviously before COVID, we are doing classroom training, we also offer a huge variety of a course catalog in and online. And we also just recently launched a pre-trip inspection app called compliance box, which is intended to take drivers the extra mile of instead of just passing through a scale without a DOD officer, taking a closer look to be able to help the characters also pass a compliance audit. So we're, we're giving drug, pardon me, we're giving drivers the tools. They need to conduct an effective inspection and then properly completing out the loop so that they can pass an audit later down. The line of that happens. And specifically it is the pre-trip inspection tool that I invited you on the show to talk about today. So that's the thing I brought it up. Well, I find it unique. I mean, and what I want you to talk about, or at least one of the points of, I want you to, to explain every ELD system and with Canada going ELD likely June the 12th. Oh, that could change as we know, but likely June the 12th is the target date right now and all us bound trucking companies, or all trucking companies in the U S are already using an ELD and every, or all the LDS that I've seen have a pre-trip component as part of what makes your S solution different. Well, I found doing the compliance audits that the majority or almost all of the ELD provided solutions for pre trips definitely are not audit friendly. And most of them have basically taken the old PDF and turned it into just a, an electronic or the old paper form and turn it into an electronic PDF. Our inspection app goes a step further and we give the drivers a guided inspection. So while they're doing the inspection, we list all of the potential defects in NSC standard 13, or schedule, sorry, or they own a service criteria, depending on the type of vehicle they are operating. We provide additional context like defining what a flat tire is in the app. Most drivers do not know the answer is anything less than 50% of the maximum inflation pressure on the sidewall. So we're giving all that information to driver, to conduct an effective inspection. We also do the risk rating for the driver. So at the end of the day, when they find X defect, the app will automatically cross-reference the appropriate schedule and the out of service criteria to give the driver an effective go no-go that hopefully will help prevent pressuring third party to, to push the vehicle, to be operated with an unsafe condition. And then finally is closing that audit loop. So when we're coming into a compliance audit, one of the things that we want to see is that if there's a repair that happened for one of the items on the schedule, that it was identified by the driver. And, and that's a big problem in this industry, because what happens when a guy does a pre-trip and finds a light out, usually they'll fix it. And then they Mark on their pre-trip no defects found. And then we come in and do the audit and we find the parts for that scenario. And there's a question in the Alberta audit that says our drivers conducting effective trip inspections. And if we always have those pencil whipped, no defect found sections, then that answer generally gets no, the drivers aren't doing effective ones. So as an example, I just did an internal audit for a carrier last week, and they're using their a pre-trip app that was built into their ELD system. And I said, for unit one, two, three, can you show me all of the trip inspections that have a defect in the last six months? And they went, no, like I can't do that. I can show you all of the pre trips, but I can't tell you the ones where there was just a problem. And then sorting through that pile of PDFs that that program produced. I found four or five, that there was a defect that had never been repaired because somebody wasn't trained properly to look into the system to see that it was reported. So that's the gap that we're trying to pre trips and NLDS, or a lot of companies are focused on getting you through the scale house, which is definitely important. Okay. Ken safety's mentality has been what can increase highway safety so that you didn't never have a problem at the scale. And then if something were to happen and you need a compliance audit, we want to make sure you're going to pass that and make it simple. And Chris, you Bryant, I want you to expand or partially repeat, I guess, because I really think this is important. You touched upon one of my favorite subjects were all of these clean vehicle inspections done by the drivers and all of the repairs that are also being made that miraculously, the mechanic knew to go and repair. Exactly. Right. So there's a disconnect there and I'm from Ontario and MTO has the same thing they're going, well, how in the hell did that happen? And it sounds like you and Alberta are on the same page. Can you expand on why that is so important that the driver does a vehicle inspection, creates the defect and then lets the mechanic, sorry, in notes, the defect on the, either the paperwork or the ELD. Why is that so damn important? Well, first of all, I can tell you on the enforcement side of things, when my time at the, at the scale house, when you would have me back in the days of the preacher book and now with the ELD file, I would flip through the last 30 days or whatever you gave me and be like, Oh, we've never found a defect on your vehicle. There's probably been a flat tire or something. So I don't think you're taking a close enough look, that's, that's gonna trigger me wanting to do a full level one inspection. But the, the bigger part of it is the answering that audit question are drivers doing effective trip inspections? And if in your personal program, whatever tools that you're using that you're using, you should be cross-referencing the repairs and your, your annual speedups or your PM vis. And if there's any items on there that your drivers aren't catching that are on the appropriate schedule, then you should take that as a training opportunity to improve your drivers because your, your scheduled maintenance, or when you get the vehicle into the shop or your PM, VI is not the time of year to be doing those repairs on those crucial items. They need to be inspected and maintained daily. I think probably one of the other things that can tell you how crucial that is, is Ontario back in the nineties, was having some problems with some wheels off. I've seen there's some very recent news with a couple more incidents that happened here in Alberta. I would put money on average. We have a wheel off every day in Alberta. The problem is, I guess the good thing about it is out here in Alberta, when a wheel comes off, it inconveniences a farmer by going through a fence post, we just don't have the population density that Ontario does. And we've been getting lucky without people getting hurt. That being said, I was driving and Edmondson on the Anthony. He had died a summer and came across a set of duals that had come off of a truck going the other way and impacted another commercial vehicle heading the opposite direction down. The divided highway that driver was, was hospitalized, but seemed to be okay from the last diapered. So there's a huge ramification to make sure that you guys are ultimately responsible. The drivers are the last line of defense to the vehicle safety and maintenance program. And making sure that they're doing effective inspections that are recorded properly to cover you later. One of the things that I always like to reference is it's not about getting through the scale house. That that's the bar that a lot of people have, but you want to make sure that if a impaired driver pulls out in front of one of your trucks and the effective inspection was done, you're all good. If your driver forgot to document something that day now there's something for the crown prosecutor to say, okay, that truck had X critical safety defect that the driver should have caught. And it shouldn't have been there to be involved in the collision with that impaired driver. We're seeing some of those cases out of the States right now. Yeah. Well, even here in Canada is starting to become a big deal. I mean, there's two legal terms that you remind me of joint and several legal liability and BrainPOP, Various liability and due diligence is the two that I referenced a lot. The, the CA the carrier needs to make sure that they've done everything they can for their due diligence, to make sure that those drivers are, are properly trained. The vehicles are properly maintained. And those two go hand in hand, when it comes into a driver doing an effective pre-trip before they put the vehicle into motion. At the beginning of the day, I do realize post-trip inspections are really important. Our legislation across Canada doesn't require them just as long as there's been an inspection in the last 24 hours. So my classroom training is focused on suggesting drivers do really thorough post-trip inspections so that you have time to get something fixed. You don't want to find out that, Oh, okay. I have a crack suspension at the start of the shift. When you need the vehicle, you want to get up time to be able to have it fixed. But as long as if, if your carrier is not doing effective post trips, we really need to double down and make sure that our, our pre-trip inspections are coming up. One of the things that my soap box is, is air brakes. We recently just created a poster for effectively. I keep using that term, but it's very important inspecting and adjusting air brakes with automatic Slack adjusters. And I just said a term that a lot of people will balk at me for adjusting automatic Slack adjusters, and that poster, I do not use a wrench. You go underneath, you do a Mark and measure the same way the commercial vehicle enforcement will. If your brakes are out of adjustment, you have to do several hard brake applications to make sure that the automatic Slack adjusters working and it properly adjusted it. If it didn't do an adjustment, you now have to defects the brakes out of adjustment. And the auto Slack's not working, both of them have to be repaired. And my circulating that around my peer group, I had several people go like, Oh, well, I don't have to do this. Cause I have disc brakes. Now you still have to go underneath and make sure that you have no air leaks on both your service and supply side of the, of your air system. You have to make sure that your brake pots, the desks are not loose. There's, there's still inspection items that are required. So air brakes is a, is a huge problem that I don't think has improved much over the last 20 years. And that's one of the things that we take in compliance box to be able to show that additional information and give those drivers the tools they need to conduct that effective inspection. Yeah. I mean, I'll make a facetious comment here. How important are brakes on a truck? Well, very one of the things that I put in that poster is I usually find good drivers have brakes out of adjustment. When we do one of the services cake out offers is we actually do the same, basically a full level one like the DOD do all night. We do it as education ticket book. And when we find breaks out of adjustment, generally they are good drivers that have brakes out of adjustment. And the reason for that is Saskatchewan did a good study. And when you were the thickness of three sheets of paper off of your brake lining, that can require up to an additional quarter inch of pusher on travel on traditional drum style brakes. So if you imagine your average, good driver is only using what maybe 10 pounds on the brake pedal to come to a stop at a stop sign they're wearing down the brake lining more and more over throughout the day. And the only way that an automatic Slack adjuster knows that it needs to make an adjustment is with a full heartbreak application. So if you are only using five, 10 pounds throughout your shift, and you've worn down six sheets of paper or brake lining, that's half an inch. And if you were already at the limit, when you started your shift, your breaks are not a lot of adjustment and they're working properly. You're just not using them. Right? So one of the guidances that we usually give when we, when we say that, and we do our compliance inspections is if you come to a stop sign or red light break, normally once you've gotten to a full and complete stop, which reflected the floor, give it a full 90 plus pound PSI application. If your brakes needed an adjustment and you're on a socks are working, they should at least ratchet a little bit. And then we watched the trucks, leave the site, get to the stop sign. And not quite when they're stopped yet, the truck comes to a screeching halt because these guys are used to doing rolling stops and thought they were actually stopped. Yeah, no, this is one of my favorite subjects. There's two things that I want you to address here. One that it's not just, you know, Berta, that truck drivers are still expected to get under their unit and do a Mark and measure as part of a vehicle inspection. And I can't tell you how many road evaluations I do and that never, and I mean, never happens at least here in Ontario. And the other question I want you to elaborate on again is how do you do a brake adjustment from the cab? So well, because again, this is one of my favorite subjects that I look at truck drivers. And I say like during the, their vehicle inspection, they never even talk about the break pot. They never even say, Hey, I looked at the break at the push rod. Even if they haven't done a Mark and measure, I'd be somewhat happy if I leased, they looked at it went, Oh, it's at 90 degrees, which I know isn't the right way to do the things, but at least they've got it in their mind. Most drivers, I do it and they just ignore, they check tire pressure maybe, and they ignore the brakes. Sorry, a bit of a rant. I think we're both on the same page on that rant. There's nothing more frustrating than just spending some time at a local flying J and watching guys curl onto their sleeper and walk in and use the bathroom and grab a coffee and put the truck in gear and go after their eight hours off. So I will take the guys that at least bend over and see if the air brakes are, are at 90, when they're on their way back hearing their coffee versus not looking at all. But at the end of the day, you need to make sure that that equipment is working in the event that Canada man, we have to use this example. If, if a bus little hockey players pulls up in front of you, you want to make sure that all of your equipment is working properly. And the only way to do that is to simulate the exact same thing that happens when you're in the cab, by stepping on the brake pedal. So a Mark and measure is the only effective way to know what your brakes are actually doing. It's exactly what the DOD are going to do. If you have a full level, one inspection. And if you want to make sure that when you pull into the scale or you got the red and blue lights behind you, your truck is the best shape it possibly can be to pass that inspection. You need to do a Mark and Meg measure continuously, like I said earlier, wearing out three sheets of paper can be a quarter inch of push on travel. So if you're not on top of this all the time, or if you have a break that's dragging, you easily can have a breakout of adjustment. If you're not using your automatic sock adjusters appropriately. And to what you said, the way you can adjust your brakes from in the cab, you should be verifying to make sure this works because yes, honest lacks do do fail. They, they might break, but if I was doing an inspection and I found a break that had was, was out of adjustment, the way to do that is to, to climb back into the cab with the brakes released and wheels chocked, and give several hard 90 pound PSI plus brake applications and air brakes are a little bit slow. So you want to give time for everything to travel, that ratchet to click, if it needs to, and then release, give a time for everything to release all the way back down and apply again. And then the only way to make sure that it works is to apply and hold. Now our vehicles are not set up to do this appropriately. I've been lobbying then next to, to have a valve that applies the service brakes, the drivers can do good pre trips. If you've got a trailer just jammed with the spike down, or if you've got to do a Canadian style of hockey stick from the seat to the brake pedal. One of the things I recommend is a carpenter's one clap turned around. So you can expand it out between either the steering wheel or the seat or whatever works for your camp, configuring invigoration, then get back underneath and see. And if that brake didn't move, like I said before, you've got two violations or two defects, one, the brakes out of adjustment, and two, the automatic automatic Slack adjuster didn't work. So even if you're certified to do a brake adjustment, so depending on your province across Canada, or you take it to a shop and they go and do a manual adjustment on that break, you're still not correcting the defect, which is the defective automatic Slack adjuster. And if that Slack adjuster is broken and the ratchet insides not properly clicking into place, giving a manual adjustment is only going to work until you've had a couple of bumps down the road. And then that breaks defective again. So if your guys aren't going to do anything underneath the vehicle, making sure they're at least trying to do six packs, but at the end of the day, explain what a six pack is. Yes, I'm sorry. A six pack is exactly what I just mentioned. So six heartbreak applications of at least 90 PSI and time of full application. Wait, make sure that there's no way of the lag of the system set time to catch up and then release and wait long enough for everything to come off. It does take a couple seconds for breaks to release and apply again until you've done it six times, that is the only allowed six pack in a, in the commercial driver world at this time with our drug and alcohol testing. Well, the zero tolerance, commercial drivers though. And again, going back to the vehicle inspection drivers, not doing this, the other thing that they are not doing, at least my experience is they're not testing the tractor protection though. And I often think that I can do the two things at once. I can do the six pack. That's going to reduce my hair. And then eventually if I keep going, it's going to pop the tractor protection belt just while I'm on it. Can you explain for the listeners and the viewers, what the heck is a tractor protection valve? Yeah. Well, first I'm gonna argue that you're probably doing three things when you're, when you're batting the breaks down. The, the other thing you're going to do is be giving yourself a little bit of a leg workout, get that cardio in because some of those break systems that takes a lot of effort, but I tractor protection valve will isolate the tractor in the event that a trailer disconnects, while you're heading down the road, obviously with all of your braking coming from air, the last thing you want to have happen is a trailer disconnect to sever those airlines and all of your air bleed out. And you've got nothing. So the tractor production valve has to kick on by at least 20 PSI. And that will isolate your truck from, from the trailer. And we'll automatically make sure that the brakes are starting to kick on, on the truck as well, but that, that isolation to make sure that when your, your tractor production develops engaged and the way to do this, like you were talking about, and you can take your glad hand off on, on the service side, connecting to the trailer, have somebody apply the brake. There should be no more air coming through because you've isolated the truck from the trailer. Honestly, I used to think that this was such a rare defect that even myself didn't look at it all the time, but more and more in our compliance inspections, I think we found four or five of them in 2020 for one of our clients. So these things do go wrong. And one of them was a brand new vehicle that had less than 7,000 kilometers on it. It was on one of its first runs after getting up at the shop and they missed that the, they had installed a defective tractor production though. I mean, these things happen For sure when we, honestly, as soon as something's brand new or just out of a PMV, I save it. I want to inspect it because there are lots of things that I guess that's the, the comment I made earlier, drivers in the last line of defense, the scheduled maintenance, the shop is good, but they make mistakes. And it's your driver's responsibility to make sure that anything on, on the NSC schedule is inspected and is working properly before they put up your clinic here. And it service Our time is just the boat up. But I got to tell you one quick story. I worked for a company here in the East and it was an owner operator had just picked up his brand new tractor. Our process was they would bring it to our garage. Our garage does an annual inspection on it, gives it its yellow sticker. Make sure it's ready to go and slaps the decals and everything on onto the truck. Well, the truck was sitting there. All of a sudden, the mechanic looks over and says, what's the oil underneath the truck. And this is a brand new truck. He literally drove it from the dealership tour Grush and there was a oil seal missing in the engine when the assembled the engine. And it was only the varnish that had been keeping the whole thing from leaking until it got just some horror stories on new stuff. Well, and you do have to check it like one of that, that one truck that was brand new. One of the other things that we found, and it was, there was a piece of plywood between the frame and the PTO for shipping and, and that thing got received at the dealership, upfit and<inaudible> and, and nobody caught that there was just a loose piece of woods sitting in between the PTO and the frame. Yeah. Anyways, drivers need to do vehicle inspections, which brings us back to compliance on a box In the show notes below. We've got a link to the website, compliance in a box. We've got your contact info in the show notes below wrap up the show. By once again, describing why compliance in a box is better in your opinion. And I think you've convinced me as well, that it's better than what comes with an eel. I think the best way I can do that is tell you what one of my clients told me the day they rolled out compliance box versus the ELD solution that they had. A lot of their drivers response was we have to inspect all of this stuff. I didn't know that we were responsible for that. And it, it changed how they were doing pre trips from day one. So we, instead of here in Canada, the 23 items under NSC standard 13, instead of just listing air brakes, instead of just listing wheels rooms and tires, we give all of the potential defects. We give additional information on how to inspect it, what to look for. And then we close it out in a, in a good audit loop. So that later, if something happens, an auditor can say, show me all of the defects that your drivers have found in this period of time. And not only can we do that, we're going to show you a matching repair record. That's legal, that's closing the circle. One thing for the driver, hopefully to find them and then document properly. And then the last piece is to close the circle with a work order and invoice some sort of document showing that the repair was been made. Yep. And the last piece, there's a few other LDS that will do this, but we also do a full alert. If you start inspecting a vehicle that already has a defect, that's not been repaired before you can start your inspection. We're going to start ringing bells and whistles for you to at least take a closer look at that section. Perfect. All of your contact info is below a compliance and a box. A link for that is below if you are in Alberta, because I don't think Chris wants to travel too far and you need some safety compliance services, mock audits, as I call them or pre audits of the you don't call it MTO. What do you call it? An Alberta again, your safety fitness certificate. There you go. Give Chris a call from Chris from K can. And those winks will be in the show notes below. Lastly, anybody else, any one of your listeners, if you have questions on hours of service, vehicle inspections, cargo, securement, even if I'm not in your jurisdiction, feel free to give me a call and give me an email. As long as we can give the answers to help improve carrier safety anywhere we're happy to do it. That was beautiful. As always safety people are willing to give. Thanks, Chris. Thank you, Chris. I hope you love the show as much as I did. Please leave us a, like a thumbs up a review, a comment, a rating if thank you so much. And I do really appreciate your time and join us again next week for another exciting injury.