Hi All

Just carried out a safety/quality audit at one of our depots regarding the pre-delivery and inspection of single and twin axle braked trailers that are being delivered to customer sites or towed away from our depot by the general public. A few discrepancies in the inspection recording process were identified, in particular the inspection engineers were not recording the trailers chassis number on their safety check sheets.

A couple of questions have now been raised by those engineers who carry out this task;

Q 1. As we work to fleet/plant numbers and not engine numbers or chassis numbers in the hire industry. Is there any point in recording the chassis number on a Pre-Delivery & Inspection sheet.

Q 2. Could we have the chassis number requirement removed from the Pre-Delivery & Inspection sheet as "its not relevant and does not assist anyone during the Pre-Delivery & Inspection process. All it seems to be doing is making depots fail (external ) audits by not recording it".

The issue I have with this is the plant numbers are not always present as they are only stickered on. The chassis plate more often than not is always there unless it has been damaged or unreadable.

There is a requirement to record the both the four digit fleet/plant number and the chassis number which takes seconds.

Do they have a genuine gripe or is this just about cutting corners?

Your thoughts please!

Thanks in Advance

I agree that chassis numbers would be the best way. In the motor trade they use rubbing strips which are placed over the chassis plate and rubbed to copy the plate, then affixed to job cards. This removes the human error of writing down the wrong numbers or in the wrong order. Of course there are many other human errors that it doesnt remove.