Pictured from left to right are Penske Truck Leasing associates Gregg Mangione, senior vice president of maintenance; Tony Popple, senior director of maintenance; David Barba, technician; John Marvin, district manager.Penske Truck Leasing announced Thursday it recently completed its 1 millionth voice-directed preventive maintenance inspection using its recently deployed innovative paperless technology.
“Our new approach to a voice-guided preventive maintenance process is exceeding our expectations for shop productivity and customer uptime,” says Gregg Mangione, senior vice president of maintenance at Penske Truck Leasing.
Over the last year, Penske implemented its voice-directed preventive maintenance processes for its fleet of more than 270,000 vehicles. The pioneering approach improves inspection and repair accuracy and consistency while also eliminating paperwork and ensuring full documentation and compliance with regulations, the company says.
“Our technicians have been instrumental in the success of this new process,” says Mangione. “Providing them with a hands-free solution at the point of repair and removing repetitive handwriting and keying has made their jobs easier, while at the same time improving the quality of the inspections, resulting in improved uptime for our customers.”
Penske says it commemorated the milestone by honoring David Barba, a Phoenix-based technician, who performed the 1 millionth preventive maintenance inspection on a 2018 Freightliner Sleeper Tractor.
Penske’s innovative voice-directed preventive maintenance system provides its technicians everything they need at the point of repair — reducing wasted time, motion and manual keying. The company says it taps a robust, high-speed indoor and outdoor gigabit Wi-Fi network and uses rugged mobile tablet devices for its technicians and industry-leading diagnostic tools.
The system provides voice prompts via a headset to direct technicians through a preventive maintenance inspection. It is the foundation of Penske’s proprietary preventive maintenance process, providing the ability to tailor inspections to the specific vehicle, its age, specifications and technologies now and in the future, the company says.
New facility in Pennsylvania
The company also announced the opening of a facility in Zelienople, Pa. Located at 204 Russell Road, the new Penske location offers full-service truck leasing, consumer and commercial truck rental, contract truck fleet maintenance services and connected fleet solutions, a resource to help customers address issues and options related to onboard technology systems, such as ELDs, telematics and on-board cameras.
Located along the I-79 corridor, this site contains three service bays, one wash bay and a diesel fuel island in a 13,200 sq.-ft. building on 5.4 acres.
“We selected a location that allows us to strategically support businesses in the region north of Pittsburgh and in Butler County,” says Jack Gallagher, senior vice president for Penske’s northeast region. “We look forward to serving existing and new customers from our state-of-the-art facility.”
