Outsourcing comes into the scene

More focused in business competitiveness, Brazilian producers privilege planting, harvesting, spraying and transport, delegating maintenance to the dealers

If a truck in the deadline to deliver its load in the port breaks 200 km before its destination, the transporter runs the risk of exceed the lay time in the pier. This situation generates penalties and contract problems, punishing the truck owner and compromising the reliability of the service rendered. To prevent these problems, Frank Henrique Saragoça da Silva—owner of Transmaz Transportes—prefers to outsource the maintenance of his entire fleet of trucks, transferring this responsibility to the dealer.

Any maintenance intervention is therefore carried out by the dealer through contracts of preventive maintenance. “Our focus is to ensure an efficient transport of the load and its delivery in the scheduled times”, says him. “Maintenance is the dealer’s business. It has structure, parts, skilled labor and appropriate tools to carry out the procedures.”

The company renders services to sugar and fertilizer production plants in the area of Ribeirão Preto (SP), transporting loads for exportation using a fleet of approximately 41 trucks. Each vehicle carries out 10 to 12 journeys per month. “Sugar plants carry out the planning of containers and then the loading of the vehicles”, tells Silva. “After the shipping is scheduled, the deadline to deliver the container in the port starts to run. Then the truck cannot fail.”

This example shows clearly how the companies of the agribusiness are more and more decided to outsource maintenance services. The industry is heated and rural properties are going through a moment of productive advancement, where crop mechanization is becoming an indispensable partner to levering competitiveness of the country in the international scenario.

TREND

And maintenance is a strategic support for crop prosperity. To give an idea, Silva, from Transmaz, is attended by Scania’s dealer in Ribeirão Preto (Escandinávia Veículos), which has at least five mechanics distributed by the sugar plants of the region. “Among the plants that use trucks of this brand, approximately 70 percent use third-part maintenance”, says Lucas Rangel Bueno, technical assistant manager from Escandinávia Veículos.

According to him, the maintenance is focused in the confined fleet. In other words, it is focused in the trucks that work in the transport inside the plants. “Some properties have up to 60 trucks in production, but we make available field mechanics for lower quantities such as 20 or 15 vehicles”, points Bueno. “This makes easier the life in the plantation, since the client prefers the truck staying in the plant for maintenance interventions, instead of being removed to the dealer.”

Third-part maintenance is a growing trend in the agribusiness, as says the parts and service manager from Scania Brasil, Pietro Nistico Neto. For him, the prosperity of this market is demanding more and more the producers to focus on the flexibility needed for planting, harvesting, spraying and transport, using this expertise as a differential for the business. “There are cases where the client looks for the dealer only to offer support in some situations. But there are others that prefer 100 percent of maintenance outsourcing”, highlights Neto.

With machine aging, the user usually gets a level of knowledge that allows him to carry out the maintenance of its fleet in the place where it is operating. The dealer carries out only the interventions that demand specific knowledge or tools.

SCALES

According to the company’s size, the maintenance of harvesters, tractors, seeders, sprayers and pickers, among other agricultural equipment, is outsourced in different levels.

To understand how this works, it is necessary to split the agricultural market in two sections: grain, controlled by companies of different sizes, owners of ranches that come from a few hectares of corn to thousand hectares of diversified grains, and sugar cane, controlled by huge players.

Having generally a limited structure of maintenance shop, small and medium properties prefer to carry out their maintenance using the dealers’ structure. “But larger companies use the dealer just to buy spare parts and to perform some specific services, since they prefer to carry out their maintenance internally”, explains Gregory Riordan, PA&C (Precision Agriculture and Construction) product manager from CNH Industrial for Latin America. “Cane harvesters, for example, have to be disassembled at least once a year for maintenance, since sugar cane is a very abrasive product. Plants prefer to perform this work internally, matching it with the period between harvests, from December to April.”

Normally, agricultural properties perform simple procedures of maintenance and have their teams prepared to attend simple cases such as tire repair, burn fuses and other low-complexity operations that allow the machine to come back quickly to the work. As the level of difficulty increases, the support of tools and technical knowledge of the dealers becomes crucial.

The service manager from New Holland Agriculture, Claudimir Orlando, confirms this observation. “Procedures that require electronic devices, special tools and skilled labor continue to be supported by the dealers, in the ranches or in their shops”, explains him, adding that electronic diagnosis and complex revisions have to be always carried out by the dealer network to ensure that the machine will not fail during its using time.

And Maurício de Menezes, aftersales supervisor from John Deere, remembers that the client many times considers only the hourly cost of a dealer. But the calculation that has to be performed must consider the total time that a technician needs to solve the problem. “The expert will need less time and will ensure a lower time of stopped machine”, says him. “It is also important to point that original parts installed by the authorized technician are guaranteed against production and installation failures, ensuring a more relaxed client.”