One hot topic in fleet management circles, especially governmental units, is "fleet creep", or in layman's terms the tendency for fleets to gradually increase equipment inventory over time. Fleet creep often happens when employee staffing is on the decrease. There are many factors that contribute to fleet creep and no one single solution. There are several types of equipment that are "mission critical" and not readily available as a short term rental. Many times "mission critical" equipment is low usage and, if truck mounted, ties up a truck chassis. Some examples could be: water tanker trucks and/or liquid chloride tankers used for anti-ice applications (see photo), flatbeds and/or beavertails used to transport equipment to a job site, core drilling equipment, tool vans or tool trucks, crane trucks, salt spreaders, pothole patchers or bituminous distributor units, and many more. My point is: one truck chassis spec'd for your specific needs equipped with the correctly spec'd hook loader becomes a multi-functional truck which can carry multiple different types of attachments. Mount your water tank or anti-ice tank, your salt spreader (auger type are best choice for this application), tool van body, truck crane, pothole patcher, bit distributor, flat bed, dump body, you name it, on a subframe and you are ready to go to work. One truck can be capable of all these functions. Truck chassis wears out, no problem, transfer hook loader assembly to new truck chassis and retain existing equipment attachments and you are still in business. You can virtually eliminate all low usage, mission critical, job specific type truck chassis without compromising your ability to perform these mission critical maintenance obligations. I challenge you to evaluate your fleet and see where a multi-functional hook loader equipped chassis could reduce your inventory of low usage truck chassis and save your constituents money.
