Mitch Honey’s workday starts at 6am with a quick 60-second commute from door to door.
His “office” at the Ferndale School District, WA is the garage, where he’s been six years since he first walked through the doors as a mechanic. Ever since, his job has been to keep the district’s fleet running smoothly.
Ferndale is a small town of about 16,000 nestled in the Pacific Northwest – “About as northwest as you can get in the country, aside from Alaska,” he said – and just 15 minutes from the Canadian border.
“I’ve turned wrenches since I was 12,” he said, fixing up quads and farm equipment, learning the ins and outs of mechanics on the dairy farm where he first started working.
By 17, he was deep in the world of diesel engines, handling trucks, tractors and just about anything else with a motor.
Now, with the responsibility of being shop foreman on his shoulders, he finds himself in a new chapter of his life. And all that experience has prepared him for the job he has now.
Mitch, who notes that the district is “literally 60 seconds from my front door,” starts each workday at 6am, which helps him keep his day organized, just like his shop. Ferndale has 52 buses and more than 80 vehicles in total, and each needed regular care.
One of his first major projects as shop foreman was on the computer, not under the hood of a bus, was helping to introduce Servicefinder, Transfinder’s award-winning fleet maintenance and inventory management software, to the district. Servicefinder is another tool in Mitch’s shop, designed to streamline his team’s work.
Before Servicefinder, Mitch spent countless hours with a pen, paper and calculator, manually tracking the mileage and service schedules for each vehicle.
Servicefinder had changed everything, he said. Now, with the click of a button, he can see the health of the entire fleet, track parts and generate reports.
“It’s been a time-saver and it’s been a money-saver. The money that you save with parts inventory management, that is huge,” he said. “I’m still working on parts inventory because we have a gigantic parts inventory, half of which is useless because it’s outdated. I can look at that I have in there and say, ‘I haven’t used this in 24 months. Cool, we can toss it.’”
That’s thanks to Servicefinder.
Mitch said selecting Servicefinder is one of the best decisions the department has made. The automation gives him time to focus on bigger problems, like that “lemon bus” that keeps giving them trouble or the outdated parts cluttering their inventory.
The district already had a relationship with Transfinder, utilizing Transfinder’s award-winning Routefinder PLUS to create safe and efficient routes, Tripfinder to manage field trips and Viewfinder, which provides unlimited users the ability to monitor the day-to-day operations of the transportation department and look up routing information.
Despite that relationship, Mitch did his own research for fleet maintenance software. Servicefinder ticked all the boxes Mitch was looking for.
“It has automated service tracking with mileage tracking,” he said. “Having automated mile tracking, service tracking and parts inventory was huge. “And then report generating, this was the last thing I really wanted because at the end of the year I should be able to go in and know this bus cost me this much money. Having the ability to just generate a report that says, ‘You spent this much from this date to this date’ and this many man hours – these are the biggest things that I wanted to have.”
Thanks to an efficient operation, Mitch ends most days early in the afternoon.
Mitch is grateful for his former boss and mentor, Mike Burrous, whom he learned a lot about running a shop from. Now, as the one in charge, he’s determined to honor that legacy, running the shop with the same precision and care.
Servicefinder is helping him to do just that.
And it’s played a role in improving his quality of life, closing out his day at 2:30pm, to return home to his wife and baby girl.
“I can’t complain about my schedule,” he said.
Learn more at www.transfinder.com.
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