Sabo Seeks to Expand Council’s Reach

This story appears in the March 16 print edition of Transport Topics.

The new chairman of the Technology & Maintenance Council, Steph Sabo, said that during his term, his top priority will be reaching out to segments of the trucking industry that aren’t familiar with the group in hopes of signing up new members.

He said there are “a lot” of district service managers who work for original equipment manufacturers “that don’t even know what TMC is and haven’t even seen our recommended practices book,” the industry’s maintenance bible.

Sabo spoke with Transport Topics during TMC’s annual meeting, in Orlando, Fla., last month. He is fleet maintenance manager of Norrenberns Truck Service, Nashville, Ill., and a U.S. Navy veteran as well as, for the next year, chairman of the industry’s primary technical support group.

“It would make [the service dealers’] job so much easier if they could access this information [from TMC] for their function — to get trucks fixed, to keep the equipment rolling,” Sabo said. “TMC has so much vital information for that, and it goes unutilized.”

TMC is a self-described “technical society” of more than 2,000 truck equipment, maintenance and service professionals who craft recommended practices for the people tasked with keeping truck fleets rolling. It is a council within American Trucking Associations.

“TMC is ATA’s best-kept secret,” Sabo said. “The time has come that that secret is revealed to all.”

When asked how he planned to spread the word to outside service dealers that trucking companies go to for engine repairs, transmission work and truck breakdowns that occur far from home terminals, Sabo replied, “word of mouth; I’m a believer in ‘K.I.S.S.’ — keeping it super-simple.”

The drive to bring more service dealers into the fold was started in earnest by Sabo’s predecessor, Brent Hilton.

Hilton’s initiative already has borne fruit. A year ago, TMC counted only 21 service dealer members among its more than 2,300 members. This year, TMC has more than 80 service dealer members — enough that the council decided to form a committee to examine ways to improve fleet/dealer relationships.

Service dealers were a prominent part of TMC’s February annual meeting. At a two-hour technical session, a panel of fleet and service dealer representatives engaged in the first large-scale dialogue between the groups at a TMC event (2-16, p. 3).

It is a dialogue Sabo has vowed not only to continue but to expand by placing “more emphasis on the independent repair shops,” which, unlike OEM dealerships, service any make or model truck.

“It’s really a big, important deal,” Sabo said. “There are a lot of good, independent shops that have spent the money to get much of the software to work on all makes and all models, and there are some that do come [to TMC] already — but there needs to be a whole lot more.”

When it comes to third-party maintenance providers, Sabo speaks from a great deal of experience.

Besides overseeing 28 maintenance personnel who keep Norrenberns’ 175 trucks running, Sabo is the go-to maintenance man for a NAPA Truck Service Center that the carrier owns and operates.

Norrenberns’ in-house shop personnel often cross over to the NAPA business, and Sabo wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Steph wants all of [Norrenberns’ mechanics] to be very diversified, not just with our equipment, but with all the customers’ equipment,” said Tim Kirchner, who is Norrenberns’ co-president. “He feels it gives them a better sense of responsibility or accountability.”

Kirchner, however, has yet to attend a TMC event, but he said the company never has had a second thought about sending Sabo.

“When he brings ideas back from the meetings, he just implements all kinds of things, from driver idling programs to fuel analysis programs,” Kirchner said. “He’s very big on that — he stresses the fuel time and time again.”

Kirchner, whose two brothers are also executives at Norrenberns, has known Sabo since he first joined the company.

“I remember the first day,” Kirchner said. Sabo “knew my brothers who were in the business. They’re the same age as him and actually went to school together.”

When Sabo left the Navy in 1987 — he had been a construction mechanic with the Seabees, the Navy’s construction battalion — his brother already was working as a driver for Norrenberns.

“That’s when I got hired on,” Sabo said.

His first tasks at Norrenberns were a far cry from the critical responsibilities he would undertake eventually.

“At first, I worked on a dock loading freight,” Sabo said. “I worked every Saturday as a mechanic changing oil, and as time went on, I started wrenching more, moving freight during the day and working in the evening as the mechanic.”

Sabo spent 12 years at Norrenberns before he joined TMC in 1999.

That year, Sabo said, “ATA allowed one representative from each member company to join one of the councils, and that’s when the owner of [Norrenberns] said, ‘Okay, you ought to do that.’ ”

He got his feet wet quickly, joining up with TMC’s S.5 study group, which reviews fleet maintenance management issues. ISO 9000, a set of quality management standards for business, was a hot topic when Sabo was a new hand at TMC.

“I went through the task force list to see what interested me, [and] the first one was the ISO 9000 task force” Sabo recalled.

When the task force hashed out a recommended practice for carriers looking to make their shops ISO 9000-compliant, Norrenberns was among the first to adopt it, he said.

Four years after his first TMC meeting, Sabo became chairman of the S.5 study group.

“By the time I became S.5 chair, everyone was kind of freaking out,” Sabo said, laughing. “‘Who is this long-haired hippie wanting to be S.5 chair right off the bat?’ ” he joked, referring to the long ponytail he once sported.

Among the major developments of his S.5 chairmanship is TMC’s Fleet Maintenance Portal, an Internet database designed to deliver technical data and diagrams from a wide range of truck and component OEMs to maintenance personnel on the shop floor.

In 2006, Sabo received the Silver Sparkplug, TMC’s highest honor. He shared the stage, and the honor, that year with Hilton.

Now, as the chairman, he finds himself on the cusp of what he called his “grand initiative,” to continue the work Hilton started and bring more service dealers into TMC.

It is a task that Carl Kirk, ATA’s vice president of councils, reckons Sabo can handle.

“Steph Sabo has the heart and the soul of trucking,” Kirk told TT. “He sees the field of maintenance as a profession rather than a mere vocation and takes immense pride in TMC as an organization.”