Tech talk

Most of our Rihm Kenworth dealership service departments have designated drive-through, or triage, bays. Having specified triage bays benefits our customers by allowing a skilled diagnostic technician to efficiently provide each customer with an expert diagnosis and recommended course of action in a short time frame. A triage is typically completed within just two hours of the truck first checking in at the shop, but a triage bay should not be thought of as a repair bay in any way. Instead, the triage bay technician’s sole purpose is to efficiently diagnose the vehicle’s issue and then determine if the needed fixes qualify as quick or long repairs based on Kenworth’s recommended diagnosis and repair process described below. 1st - A truck arrives with a complaint and goes to the triage bay. 2nd - The diagnostic technician in the triage bay will look at the complaint and perform a check-in inspection. 3rd - The diagnostic technician determines if this is a repair that can be classified as a quick repair or if it will require further diagnostics to be done. Quick Repair Bay – Repairs that a diagnostic technician believes will take 4 hours or less to complete once started, but this does not mean it will be repaired immediately or even within 4 hours. This is because quick repairs typically account for up to 75% of the total jobs worked on in a shop. However, being diagnosed as a quick repair does mean that the truck will be put into the list of work orders that the quick repair lane will then complete in the order of which they were received. The total time needed for quick repairs can vary depending on current technician availability and workloads in our shops. Long Repair Bay – If it is determined that your truck will need additional diagnostics performed or a lengthy repair, then it will be assigned to the main shop and added to the work order list for the long repair technicians in our shop. With all of that considered, the part that a triage bay plays in this process is being able to provide each of our customers with more information about the needed repairs right away at service check-in. This information then allows owners and fleet managers to make an educated decision on how to proceed. This could include many decisions from waiting until later to have the repair done, to putting the driver in a hotel, scheduling the load to another driver, or even flying the driver home. These are all decisions that the owner or fleet manager will need to make based on the information provided from the triage. Here at Rihm, we understand that for our customers any amount of downtime can be extremely costly. That is a large reason why we choose to have a skilled diagnostic technician focused solely on looking at trucks in the triage bay and determining if issues are critical enough that the truck should stay off the road, or if it is safe enough for the truck to continue being driven while a part is on order or other work orders are being completed. In short, the main purpose of a triage bay is not to perform repairs quickly, but instead to accurately diagnose a complaint or issue on a truck right away. This timely information then gives the owner or fleet manager the ability to make an informed decision on how to move forward in the most economical way for their business. THE REAL PURPOSE FOR HAVING A TRIAGE/EXPRESS BAY TECH TALK Authors: Cal Lamke and Megan Meier, Rihm Family Companies