fleetHQ Takes Chill Out of Roadside Emergencies

As the owners of Rowland Transportation, a mid-size refrigerated carrier in Dade City, Fla., Doc Hyder and his brother and sister are definitely “hands-on” when it comes to fleet operations. The company’s 63 tractors and 80 refrigerated trailers deliver perishable food products throughout the lower 48, with most of the company’s business in the Southeast.

With food, on-time delivery is critical. It’s a promise to customers that’s made easier with Goodyear and its fleetHQ program.

“If we have a problem with a tire, Goodyear has a network of dealers who can get us back up and running fast,” says Hyder. “And we don’t have to haggle over pricing. What we pay for a tire on the road is what we pay for the tire at home.”

It wasn’t always that way for Hyder.

“For years my brother and I were on call 24/7. We’d get phone calls from our drivers explaining the problem. Then we’d handle, approve, and pay for tire services on the road,” he says. It seemed like tire problems always happened in the middle of the night. Hyder would search the Internet for someone who could make a service call ASAP. “They might charge you $25 to change the spare, or $200. If you needed a tire, they might charge you double because it’s the middle of the night and they have you over a barrel. Then our other costs started multiplying. We’d still be paying for fuel to run our reefers, and lose our delivery time and customer goodwill. The cost of a tire problem went well beyond the cost of replacement.”

The company turned the corner on controlling tire costs when it developed a cradle-to-grave tire program with McGee Tire. The company began using retreads, utilizing Goodyear’s UniCircle process. McGee also put Goodyear’s 4-Tires-Now emergency roadside service into place for Rowland. The program evolved into fleetHQ in 2008.

“When a customers signs up for fleetHQ, we develop a tire list so that when fleetHQ is called, dispatchers know immediately what type of tires are needed for replacement,” says Duane Koscielski of McGee Tire. “And our customers can track online the status of repairs and the history of using our emergency roadside program. Plus they don’t have to pay an incidence fee for using the service. They just pay the service cost, and what they pay on the road for the tire is what they pay if they bought directly from us. And we provide the bill so our customers get just one invoice.”

“It doesn’t get much better than that,” says Hyder as his grin widens. “fleetHQ allows us to control our costs and control what tires are going on our vehicles. It also allows us to get back up and running faster than ever, which not only makes our drivers happy but our customers as well.”