Keeping your Scania on the road and – importantly getting it running swiftly if there’s a problem – is the sole aim of the UK’s most advanced technical centre
How much does your manufacturer or dealer care about your vehicle? It’s a simple question that has only one answer for Scania: Everything.
That’s why it’s just spent £100,000 on an upgrade at its Loughborough Technical Centre (LTC), but this is just one – albeit very important part – of a short chain that runs from the factory-based R&D team to your local dealer.
Scania’s technical centre is long-standing, but the move to a new Euro 6 product range, with the increasing complexity it brings, has prompted this investment.
Seamless service
With 90 dealerships across the UK – a mix of directly owned and partners – it is where a Scania vehicle normally makes its first call, whether for a service or fault-finding; other makes are also dealt with.
With the increasing popularity of Scania’s repair and maintenance (R&M) contracts that come with all new coaches (and trucks), there is a strong incentive to ensure that the dealerships perform.
And, 98% of the time they do with faults being fixed in the workshop. For the remaining 2%, that’s where LTC comes in. In total there are 1,257 technicians across the Scania network, of whom 216 are Master Technicians, and 27 are regionally-based Escalation Technicians.
Their role is to deal with the trickier faults that can sometimes fox a dealership.
If they have trouble, their next step is to contact LTC, where nine Technical Engineers between them have 26 specialisms, such as gas engines, cooling systems and coach bodies.
Investment
The LTC, built in 1998 as racing pigeon auction rooms in a rural site, is in a modern steel-framed building, with a large workshop capable of holding at least 16 vehicles, plus a canteen and numerous meeting and training rooms.
Scania took the building over in 2000. since then it has been the hub for training all technicians, not only as part of initial training, but with ongoing continuous professional development.
Its six technical instructors run 61 different courses and carry out 5,618 man-days of training a year, an annual investment of £1.1m specifically in training.
For all new products – the newly-launched truck range being a case in point – all technicians come to LTC to learn about it. Says Mark Grant, Aftersales Director, Scania (Great Britain), who is responsible for the operation: “Product knowledge is really important for new products.
“It’s vital that technicians have seen, touched and felt the product before a customer sees one.
“We spend billions on new generation vehicles and it would be a travesty if we could not support them.”
Problem solving
For LTC’s nine Technical Engineers there are two key aspects. Firstly a computer system that allows access to every aspect of the vehicle’s manual and other information. Secondly, a telephone-quality wi-fi network means that using headsets, the technicians can go and look at the same vehicle in the workshop, while talking to a technician on site.
For this reason, one of each of the current products is on site – for example Scania’s integral Touring and an Irizar-bodied coach. “It means that we can sit in a cab and see exactly which switch is being talked about, while we are on the phone, using our handsfree headsets,” says Technical Manager Aaron McGrath.
As transport is a 24/7 business, Scania also has Global Technical Support around the clock via its Swedish, Brazilian and Hong Kong-based service hubs. It ensures that even when one part of the world is asleep, there is always someone to help.
Of the calls dealt with by LTC, a small number in itself – perhaps just 10% – require further escalation to the factory. This is where Scania’s research and development team comes in. With 3,500 staff and an annual spend of €700m a year its two key roles are developing future products and maintaining the current range.
Years ago, some manufacturers used to deal with problems by designing them out of future products. With extensive all-weather and all-terrain testing, there are considerably fewer problems, but they can occasionally occur. More usually, they are software and electrical, rather than powertrain related. Scania is determined to fully support operators, rather than ignore any issues.
Up and down
Rather than R&D being an isolated hub, it is an integral part of the service support network. And, monitoring is a crucial aspect of customer service, adds Paul Frost, GM Aftersales Support Services.
Every single job – or roadside breakdown – is logged onto Scania’s system, and aftersales can see its progress, using real-time data displayed at LTC. If there is an issue that can’t be solved quickly, then a loan vehicle will be provided.
The exact nature of the problem, and how far it has been escalated, for example to the LTC or beyond, is displayed. It means that days of a ‘problem’ vehicle being stuck at a dealership, with no-one higher up in the organisation being aware of it have long gone.
Scania prides itself on vehicle uptime, but it is also honest and open and admits that problems can occur. This transparency extends to revealing to us the live jobs on the systems.
We can’t reveal what we saw, but we can tell you that across the UK on the day we visited there were only four coaches/buses that had issues outstanding more than a day – and all had solutions underway.
This is against a background of around 21,000 vehicles (truck and coach/bus) passing through Scania’s workshops every six weeks.
Adds Aaron McGrath: “It’s the most advanced technical support centre in the industry – nobody competes with what we’ve got here today.
“In the last 18 months we’ve started remote vehicle monitoring and have live remote diagnostic capability.
“We no longer have to jump in a van. We can now do this remotely, with the object of getting the customer back on the road as quickly as possible.”
To achieve this needs clever equipment. In addition to 4G phones, thanks to satellite phones, LTC can connect to a vehicle anywhere, from the bottom of a quarry to remote parts of Northumberland even where there isn’t a phone signal.
Concludes Mark Grant: “We ensure that problems are solved locally and as fast as possible. We believe this is not just an investment for today, but for many years to come.”
