|
Steve Hillis, support services and fleet manager for the town of Alcoa, Tenn., (population: 9,000) relies on maintenance technology and a new shop to help the municipality’s police and service departments deal with the Blount County’s biggest challenges: tourists and traffic.
Supporting the vehicles and equipment required to manage those crowds of tourists “takes a lot of care, which is why we have so much investment in cruisers and fleet maintenance,” Hillis told Light & Medium Truck.
Hillis oversees maintenance of the municipality’s 35 police cruisers, as well as more than 350 other municipal units. That is a lot of police cruisers for a small municipality, but they are needed to patrol some of the heaviest-traveled roads in the Eastern United States.
Alcoa is just south of Knoxville and north of one of the entrances to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The park is one of the nation’s busiest tourist destinations, attracting more than eight million visitors every year, Hillis said. Alcoa also is the site of McGhee Tyson Airport, which serves Knoxville, as well as a Tennessee Army National Guard headquarters. As a result, some of the roads around Alcoa will carry 80,000 vehicles a day, he said.
Hillis benefits from one of those rare opportunities for maintenance managers when they can help decide how their shop is structured. Alcoa is building a $13 million, 100,000-square-foot service center for fleet management, purchasing and warehouse, including about 11,000-square-feet for the shop and 44,000 for the warehouse.
|
|
The center is scheduled to open in May.
The shop serves the local highway department’s 350 vehicles as well as police and other emergency vehicles. In any fleet, equipment breaks, but Hillis said the city has been very supportive of his efforts to control breakdowns by upgrading its preventative maintenance capabilities.
“The whole idea is to minimize and standardize the maintenance process. We try to standardize types of equipment and stock those parts,” he said.
Building a new shop — working from a blank slate, so to speak — gave Hillis and Alcoa the opportunity incorporate some time-saving ideas and maintenance technologies. The new shop will include kiosks with electronic capabilities for the mechanics. At the kiosks, the technicians will be able to do everything from diagnosing vehicle problems to e-mailing drivers or supervisors to bring in vehicles for maintenance.
The shop will have eight kiosks, one for every two bays. T
|