Trailer chaos at the edge of the world

It is often said that when youngsters are playing nicely, the noise level may vary but there is a general hubbub. This is quite normal; it’s nothing to worry about. It’s when things go quiet that you need to start worrying. The same, writes JIM WARD, can be true of the transport game.

Occasionally, remote contracts may go a bit quiet. This can give the impression that everything is going well, but the reality may be quite different. When you encounter operations where management allows or even initiates the cannibalisation of assets – stripping one vehicle to source spare parts for another – this is usually symptomatic of a business in dire straits.

Trucks are most frequently subjected to this barbaric treatment. Eventually, the yard is filled with vehicles of doubtful value: there’s a truck that runs but has no starter, the MAN is missing its compressor, and the Mercedes hidden round the back has had its centre bearing removed. An Isuzu 14-tonner has lost its radiator, a Volvo its steering box, and so on.

No word of this bush surgery ever appears on the accounts radar, and they continue to go about their business in the hushed corridors of power, vigilantly pursuing the arcane art of financial accounting.

On the asset register, fleet TM37215 is a 2015 horse, with 417,284km last reported on it. It has an estimated book value of R530,000 if it were to be disposed of. In the absence of robust technical management, it may be the unfortunate auctioneers who first unearth these concealed acts of cannibalism. They may discover that vehicles can’t be started or moved to auction because they have missing brake boosters, or a discretely removed intercooler. The see-all, know-all head office may be painfully unaware of much depreciated fleet values.

What is thought to be a runner with an estimated current market value of R520,000 only fetches R285,000 on auction because the engine has no cylinder head. Nobody from operations seems to know where it’s gone; the tantrums begin. How can those trucks be worth so little? Who is to blame for it?

On auction, the best offer is 45% below book, but nobody steps up to explain the loss because no-one wants to be publicly decapitated. There are suspicions, but no-one will admit that financial targets were only met by ruthlessly stripping some assets of their components to keep the fleet operational and earning revenue – avoiding or deferring actual costs of maintenance and operational damage.

If the prevalent corporate culture dictates that targets are the only significant measure of performance, then people will do anything to meet those targets. Sometimes, someone will “make a plan” at a whole new level, baffling even the best minds. In my career, I experienced just such an instance. Startling ingenuity had been applied to a fleet of trailers. The rot began with fridge units: working units surreptitiously removed from accident-damaged trailers and fitted roughly into other load bodies. This may not seem like a big deal, but the disease soon spread.

A whisper emerging from driver feedback was heard via HR, concerning complaints about load bodies behaving oddly. The load seemed to shift around on the trailer chassis during corners and on offramps. We were sceptical, but nevertheless responded with an emergency fleet inspection. One hopes to never have to take vehicles off the road, but on this occasion, many were pulled out of operations and prevented from loading or leaving under load. This was an immensely unpopular and costly action to take.

The comprehensive technical inspections revealed several 28- and 30-pallet load bodies fastened very insecurely onto unmatched chassis rails. The short trip rapidly escalated into a lengthy visit and quite a few more bodies were found to be very badly fitted onto different chassis makes.

The characters involved had been routinely swapping around insulated bodies. They used a forklift and trestles to remove the bodies from chassis with Certificate of Fitness (CoF) challenges and refit them onto better, licenced, chassis able to pass CoF at minimal cost.

If employees are left isolated – with time, a big forklift, and abundant confidence – and then pressured to meet unrealistic targets, this can promote such skullduggery. Things seem quiet, but for all the wrong reasons.

We then discovered a separate, off-site yard, concealing more horrors. A refrigeration unit had fallen forward from a front bulkhead, partially landing on a cab roof; the unit had not been safely installed. Some bodies were indeed moving around, sliding about on the chassis rails because the underfloor cross-members and clamp bolts entirely missed chassis outriggers and cross-members. The original floors were designed for chassis with different spacing, and crucial clamp bolts often only passed through fibreglass floors and insulation. This cut-and-paste practice had gone on for some time and some trailer boxes were not even aligned with the chassis rails beneath them.

Those involved had been deferring repairs by keeping better load bodies by removing them from one chassis and dropping them onto another, regardless of whether they fitted. Clamp bolts were missing or had excessive play, and some trailer bodies were barely attached at all, held in place mostly by the weight of the load. It was highly unsafe and exactly as the drivers had described.

Chassis have VIN numbers; most load bodies don’t. When doors, bulkheads, floors, and even walls are replaced, identifying marks get lost and load bodies can lose their identity. This trailer fleet had become an Irish stew of load bodies, many of which did not fit on the chassis beneath them. One manufacturer body was now sitting on a different manufacturer’s chassis.

The original 2013 load body from factory “S” was now scrapped, or weakly attached to a 2011 trailer from body builder “I”, with the original damaged box on “E” now on a 2009 chassis from “H”. Original fleet lists no longer reflected reality.

To worsen the confusion, fridge units had also been swapped around in attempts to avoid repair costs. It was impossible to reconcile original chassis VIN numbers with fridge serial numbers or with trailer bodies when one asset number covered all three items. Fridges had sometimes been fitted to trailers before these had VIN numbers stamped into them. Major unit change records were not maintained: the workshops had been starved of maintenance funds but simultaneously told they had to keep the fleet mobile with what they had (a familiar demand).

A trailer that began life with a ThermoKing now had a Carrier fitted, and that box was now on a different chassis. None of these alterations had been properly recorded and as a result – in accounting terms – the asset registers no longer reflected what was in that fleet. Everything was bastardised and nothing was what it appeared to be. This unholy mess highlighted a serious weakness in asset registers – something that had to be addressed before we could really grasp what we had. The original asset numbers didn’t include fridge serial numbers, and load bodies themselves had no identifying serial numbers to link them to a particular chassis… It took a lot of unravelling. This was truly trailer chaos at the edge of the world!