Sunday, April 3, 2011

Equipment Replacement, How Long Can You Safely Keep Your Machines?

This is a good video overview of how one Equipment Manager uses information to make decisions and saves money. The video is about one hour long. Considering that it took him 45 years to learn this, maybe it is not too long. It will give you a good way to compare your processes to his, no matter if you have 5 machines or 874 like Bill DeRousse.

Bill will show you his numbers and explain why you need to calculate this for your fleet.
To see Video Click Here

The PowerPoint slides (which you will want) are available for free. Just send me your e-mail address by private message. (They are too large to attach and not yet published on the internet.)

DESCRIPTION:
Should a vehicle be replaced or repaired? Study an example of equipment costs (Cost Per Mile or Hour, Repair hours per mile/hour, Average age and Average usage) over the past four years and see what factors have affected costs.

PRESENTOR:

Bill DeRousse
City of Everett Washington and Everett Utilities

Mr. Bill DeRousse has been a Fleet Manager for 45 years with both private and public fleet operations. He is currently the Fleet Superintendent for the city of Everett and Everett Transit, Everett, Washington. He served for six years as the president of the Public Fleet Managers Association and now the information officer, serves as a committee chair with Seattle Chapter of NAFA. Serves on many committees within the state Of Washington as well on several national transit and vehicle committees. Bill is a public speaker in all areas of fleet management giving presentations throughout the United States annually.

For more info on the calculating Best Equipment Replacement points in time, Click Here or send me a Private Message. Please post comments about the video or subject matter.

Why Software Is Cheap!

Quote Originally Posted by Beel, http://heavyequipmentforums.com/ Click here: View Post
Does anyone know of a decent cost estimating program that doesn't cost a gazillon dollars?! I have surfed the net for weeks and have tried every garbage program out there. They are either too confusing or focused on residential/commercial building, and remodeling. Can't seem to find anything focused on heavy construction priced reasonably under $1000.

The only problem with $1,000. is that gives you about 8 hours of time to:
Respond to 100 prospects who might be a buyer
Train the Client (10 hrs minimum)
Develop a program with 6000 computer programmer hours
Develop the documentation for the program
Hire and Train the Support Technicians and Sales Staff
Pay for the office overhead
Develop software improvements
Make a small profit

You can do this if you sell more than 500.000 programs. However there are about 21,311 Heavy Construction businesses in the U.S. and you are not going to sell all of them.

So if you get 21,311 to give you 100 sales of $1,000., you will make $100,000 this year which will never pay your costs. You need to turn this around and figure what it costs you NOT to have a good estimating program. A good estimating program will make you hundreds of thousands of dollars. (I can say this because we do not sell estimating programs.) if you spend $12,000 to make $60,000 you just made $5.00 for ever $1.00 you spent this year! Next year is $2,000. for the same $60,000. And so on.

You can see why the $12,000 is a real deal!