Our fleet workshop schedules servicing and safety inspections for about four hundred heavy vehicles. A few checks are due by date, but most are due by distance, and the maintenance system works out when a vehicle needs to come in from the latest mileage it holds.
That mileage came from our fuel cards. When a driver fills up, the pump terminal asks for the odometer reading, and the card company sends us a file of every transaction each night. The file already existed, and the workshop needed a number from somewhere.
Last winter a tractor unit went past its brake inspection interval by nine thousand kilometres. Nothing failed, but our transport manager found it in a routine audit, the kind of finding that ends up in front of a regulator. The vehicle's recorded mileage had barely moved in two months. Drivers at the pump, often in the dark, with a queue behind them and a terminal that would not continue without a number, had been typing whatever got them through. The previous reading. A row of zeros. In one case, the driver's own staff number. The system simply took the latest value, so one low entry could quietly push a vehicle's next service months into the future.
Across the fleet, roughly one transaction in seven carried a reading that could not be true, either going backwards or jumping further than a lorry can travel between two fills. Thirty one vehicles were overdue for something.
Every one of those vehicles already reported its real distance through the telematics unit we had fitted for route tracking. Nobody had ever connected the two systems.
The maintenance system now takes its mileage from telematics. The pump reading is still stored, but only as a cross check, and when the two disagree by more than a few hundred kilometres the workshop gets a task to look at the vehicle. A reading that goes backwards or implies an impossible distance is rejected and flagged rather than saved. When a telematics unit stops reporting, its vehicle is booked in by date until the unit is repaired.
We had chosen that source because it was convenient, not because anyone entering it had a reason to get it right. A number typed by somebody who needs to get past a screen says very little about the thing it claims to measure.
– Serguey Shinder
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