Fleet Service Writer & Maintenance Scheduler

Full-Time | Maintenance and Infrastructure | Hamilton, Ohio
Reports to the Director of Maintenance and Infrastructure
Benefits: OPERS pension, medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and 232 hours of paid time off in your first year, which works out to 29 days.

Every weekday morning, buses have to leave the yard on time. Whether that happens cleanly or turns into a scramble at five in the morning depends heavily on one person, and we are hiring that person.

The Fleet Service Writer runs the work order desk at Butler County Regional Transit Authority. You decide what the shop touches today and what waits until tomorrow. You know which units are down, why they are down, and when they are coming back. You are who Operations calls when they need to know if there are enough buses, and you are who the technicians count on to have the parts, the paperwork, and the schedule ready before anyone picks up a wrench.

If you have run a service desk at a dealership, a truck center, a school bus garage, or a municipal fleet, you already know most of this job. What is different here is what rides on it. The vehicles you keep moving carry more than 820,000 passenger trips a year for people getting to work, to dialysis, to class, and to the grocery store.

What you will actually do

Run the work order desk.  You will open, assign, prioritize, and close every work order in our maintenance system, which is Eptura Asset. That means accurate meter readings, honest labor hours, clean parts issues, and a repair history you would be willing to defend in an audit. You will become the person who knows the software better than anyone else in the building, which also means training technicians on it and being the one who calls the vendor when something breaks.

Own the schedule.  Preventive maintenance by mileage, hours, and calendar. State inspections. Warranty work, recalls, and manufacturer campaigns. Outside vendor and contract work, including chasing down the shop that promised you a Thursday turnaround and has gone quiet. You will build the daily and weekly plan against the technicians and bay space you actually have, not the ones you wish you had.

Be the bridge to Operations.  Maintenance and Operations do not always want the same thing on the same day, and this position sits directly between them. You will tell dispatch what is available before pull out, take in driver defect reports and road calls, close the loop back to the operator who reported the problem, and raise a flag early when you can see a fleet issue turning into a service failure.

Keep the record straight.  Our maintenance records support Federal Transit Administration reporting, National Transit Database submission, and Ohio Department of Transportation review. You will also produce the recurring numbers leadership runs the department on: preventive maintenance compliance, out of service percentage, road calls, mean distance between failures, and repair cost by unit. We use those numbers to make real decisions, so we need them to be right.

Minimum qualifications

• High school diploma or equivalent.
• Two or more years as a service writer, service advisor, maintenance planner, scheduler, or fleet coordinator.
• Real proficiency with a maintenance management system, fleet software, or dealership service software. Proof of competency required.
• Solid Excel and Outlook skills, and ability to learn new software quickly and then teach it to someone else.
• Comfort reading repair orders, service manuals, parts catalogs, and manufacturer bulletins.
• The communication skills to work productively with technicians, operators, dispatchers, vendors, and directors, sometimes in the same hour.
• Valid driver license and an acceptable driving record.

Preferred qualifications

• Transit, school bus, motorcoach, municipal fleet, or heavy duty truck experience.
• Hands on time with Eptura Asset, Fleetio, Trapeze, RTA Fleet, or something comparable.
• Familiarity with Federal Transit Administration maintenance and reporting requirements.
• Warranty administration and recall tracking experience.
• ASE certification or equivalent technical coursework.
• A Class B CDL with passenger endorsement, or willingness to earn one.

Honest notes about the job

You will split your time between a desk and an active shop floor, so expect noise, weather, and the occasional lift up to 25 pounds. The standard schedule is Monday through Friday, but service starts early and problems do not respect business hours, so some early, late, or weekend availability is part of the deal. On the days when three buses go down at once and the parts are three days out, this job gets genuinely difficult. It also gets solved, and you will be the reason.

About Butler County RTA

BCRTA is a political subdivision of the State of Ohio organized as a Regional Transit Authority under Ohio code. BCRTA acts as the designated recipient for Federal Transit Funds and provides public transportation services within and around Butler County, Ohio including Hamilton, Middletown, Fairfield, West Chester, Oxford, and Miami University. The BCRTA employs or directs around 120 transit employees and manages an annual budget over $15M. BCRTA is governed by a nine-member Board of Trustees.

BCRTA is a public transit agency dedicated to support Butler County’s quality of life and economic development through public transportation solutions.

Our employees enjoy a work culture that promotes inclusion, diversity, cooperation, problem-solving, teamwork, independence and ingenuity.

BCRTA benefits now include medical, dental, vision, life insurance and short-term disability coverage in addition to generous paid time off, 14% retirement match in the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS), opportunities for advancement, and professional development.  

*Hiring is through our main office in Hamilton, Ohio. 

Applications are public records and will only be reviewed once for each position. Applicants must submit a separate application for each position of interest. BCRTA applications do not represent a contract of employment.

"BCRTA states as its policy a commitment to provide equal opportunity to all persons in matters affecting all employment processes (including but not limited to recruitment or recruitment advertising, hiring, upgrading, selection for training, promotion, transfer, demotion, layoff, termination, rates of pay, or other forms of compensation) without regard to a person’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), age, genetic information, or veterans status.

Further, BCRTA is committed to complying with Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act and prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. BCRTA will make accommodations that are reasonable and not unduly burdensome to enable qualified disabled applicants and employees to participate in the employment process and perform essential job functions. "