The city of Vista, Calif., is implementing Dossier maintenance management software for its fleet of municipal vehicles and equipment.

Dossier is the flagship software product from Arsenault Associates, a company that deals with intuitive maintenance management solutions. Vista is a city of 94,500 residents and 650 companies in 18 sq. mi., 7 mi. from the Pacific Ocean in southern California.

Vista’s Fleet Maintenance Division is responsible for more than 250 pieces of municipal equipment, everything from power lawn mowers to paving and construction equipment and Vactor pumping trucks. The rolling fleet includes senior citizen buses, fire trucks and automobiles. The division also operates a fueling facility, which is jointly used with the Vista Unified School District.

“We’re still entering data and changing old systems,” said Vehicle Maintenance Supervisor David Young, “Dossier data will make my life a lot better.”

Young came to the division in March of 2006 from the unified school district where Dossier has been used to maintain the district’s school buses since 1990. That fleet currently consists of 102 buses that collectively run 1.3 million mi. per year.

Vista’s Fleet Maintenance Division staff consists of Young and five technicians, one of whom is a lead mechanic. Young brought Dossier to the city division in August of 2006.

Young said he expects to enjoy the same Dossier benefits as the city’s school bus fleet. He foresees multiple applications for the software.

“We’ll use Dossier to track equipment usages,” he said. Some vehicles, fire trucks and Vactor trucks, for example, track usage by hours in use rather than mileage.

“We’ll enter DRODs [Driver Repair of Defects] as work pending. We can then schedule the work. Everyone will be able to see what needs to be done and the vehicle’s record,” Young said.

“We have many older pieces of equipment, so scheduling and improving preventive maintenance is one of the main reasons for getting Dossier,” he said.

Young also is using Dossier to institute a bar-code-enabled inventory system for the city.

Young said Dossier has already enabled one very positive change — a single management reporting system for the jointly-used fueling facility.

For more information, visit www.arsenault.biz.

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