The defect book in the door pocket
A driver notices a cracked marker lens and a slow air leak on a trailer at five in the morning. He writes it in the defect book, which stays in the cab. Maybe he mentions it to the night planner. The trailer is swapped onto another truck at the changeover and goes out again. The workshop finds out when a different driver reports the same thing two days later.
Or the sheet does reach the office, and sits on a desk because the maintenance contractor has to be phoned and the person who phones them is busy with a breakdown.
Where the trail breaks
Most firms have a sensible process on paper. It breaks at the hand-offs, because paper cannot tell anyone it has arrived, and trailers move between trucks more often than the paperwork follows them.
- Defect books stay with the tractor unit while trailers move on.
- Reports reach the office in batches when drivers come back.
- The workshop or contractor is told by phone, with no record of when.
- Nobody can see which defects are open, which are fixed and which were checked and found fine.
- Nil-defect checks are not recorded in a way that shows they happened.
What the gaps cost
A defect that is not passed on quickly can turn into a roadside problem, a missed load or a vehicle off the road for longer than it needed to be. Repeated reports of the same fault waste driver and workshop time. And when your maintenance records are looked at, whether in an audit, a customer review or by your own transport manager, gaps between a report and a repair are hard to explain after the event. We do not advise on what your inspection regime should be; the point is that whatever it is, the paperwork should keep up with it.
The defect flow we build
- A phone app for drivers lists the walkaround checks your transport manager has defined, for the tractor unit and for the trailer separately, so a trailer's history follows the trailer.
- Drivers scan or pick the vehicle and trailer they are on. Checks are recorded with time and location, including nil-defect checks.
- Any defect is recorded with a photo and a note, and the driver marks whether they think it stops the vehicle going out. That decision still follows your own rules and your transport manager's judgement.
- Each defect is sent straight to the workshop or your maintenance contractor, by email or into their system, and appears on a board in the transport office.
- The workshop records the repair, or that it was checked and no fault was found, and the defect closes with who did it and when.
- The history per vehicle and trailer is searchable and exportable, including repeat defects.
| Moment | Paper | Digital flow |
|---|---|---|
| Defect found | Written in the cab book | Recorded on the phone with a photo |
| Workshop told | When the sheet arrives, by phone | Straight away, with a record |
| Trailer swapped | Report stays with the unit | History stays with the trailer |
| Repair signed off | On another sheet | Closed against the original report |
| Records requested | Search the filing | Export by vehicle and date |
Day to day afterwards
The transport office sees every open defect on one board, with its age. The workshop gets a clear list with photos instead of a phone call describing the problem from memory. Planners can see a trailer is waiting for a repair before they couple it to a truck for tomorrow. And the record of checks and repairs builds itself as people do the work, rather than being assembled later.
If your maintenance contractor already uses a system for job cards, we pass defects into it rather than asking them to use ours.
Is your defect process like this?
- Defect books live in the cabs.
- Trailer defects are reported more than once before they are fixed.
- The workshop hears about defects by phone.
- You cannot quickly list open defects across the fleet.
- Pulling maintenance records together takes days.