Leveling the Playing Field

A common complaint by many manufacturers who respond to written specifications is that there is a tendency to write a specification for one particular brand. While the desire to maintain a standard as well as experience with individual components or systems can drive the process, it’s important to consider if the need to tell a manufacturer how to build the truck should outweigh what you want the truck to ultimately do. It becomes a balancing act for the specification writer.

"I think that a lot more intelligent decisions are being made," remarks James Johnston, vice president and general manager for McNeilus Truck Company in Dodge City, MN. "I think it’s narrowing it down to your specific application, your labor issues, the cost of the equipment, and the budgets that are available. In the past, people got in the habit of buying this rearloader for the last 20 years. It’s common knowledge that a lot of specs are written around a few different products. That makes it very difficult for people to do open-minded decision-making. If the specs are written with small glitches so that not too many manufacturers can meet the spec, that kind of defeats the purpose of the spec process, doesn’t it?"

Over the past several years, the selection of engine and transmission manufacturers has actually shrunk, which limits the range of components available to specification writers. It almost harkens back to the era when Henry Ford offered any color the buyer wanted, provided it was black.

The drive to be more competitive has forced a change in the system. While once it was desirable to stick with what you know, being business-minded means continually analyzing the selection of equipment. "I think that the good-old-boy system of how we buy equipment is going away fast because it doesn’t make good common business sense," observes Johnston. "If we lose a bid and we put down what we have to offer, but it really didn’t meet their needs, then so be it. If we lose a bid because of a relationship or because that’s the way it’s been for 20 years, then I’m very disgruntled. Everybody, including municipalities, needs to make good common business sense decisions. I see less and less of that good-old-boy system all the time, but it’s still very frustrating when you see a bid spec and there’s no way you can meet it, but there’s no way anybody else can meet it either. You know that good business sense hasn’t been portrayed."

Kevin Watje, national marketing manager for Scranton Manufacturing/Nu Way in Scranton, IA, has also experienced the frustration of losing bids because of brand-preference spec writing. "The spirit of this spec writing or bidding process is to give us a fair chance, but it also gives the citizenry a competitive price on trucks. The mission for a municipality, as I see it, is to deliver goods and services to its taxpayers at the most efficient cost. They’ve said, ‘Let’s go out, take these trucks to bid, and try to get the most competitive price with the best deal.’ In essence, that really doesn’t happen in many, many cases. I was down in Missouri, and they actually took the highest bid on a frontloader, and it was $50,000 higher than the lowest bid. This was a community of about 20,000 people. When you buy something because you have a preference and you pay $50,000 more for it, what about the people who come to the meeting that night and want some money to help institute a new drug program to keep kids off drugs and they say no?"

Both Johnston and Watje encourage municipalities to look at what the equipment must do as opposed to how it should be built. Specifications that look at a combination of features designed to do the job and that are scored accordingly provide a more level playing field. "Out of 10 manufacturers, there’s perhaps one that might offer a substandard product to a bid, but on the whole, my competitors and I have pretty good equipment," Watje remarks. "To be fair with everybody, it should probably be more of an open spec."

Steve Bradshaw, vice president and general manager of Smart Truck Systems in Moreno Valley, CA, sees buyers getting smarter as the market forces them to be more competitive. Customers are doing more research and using manufacturers as one source of information among many. "Purchases of equipment are becoming more sophisticated. The days of photocopying a specification that somebody wrote 10 years ago and reusing it over and over are gone because things have changed. People are going on-line and getting specs off of the Internet. They’re doing their homework. They’re taking an active role in looking at how the equipment is going to be used and how it’s designed and how it’s going to serve the needs of their market."

Part of that homework involves anticipating future requirements and talking to manufacturers in detail about how today’s equipment will measure up tomorrow. "With bridge laws and weight requirements becoming more and more strict, I think people are becoming more aware of how important the construction of refuse bodies is, in addition to the overall truck. If they’re buying equipment that’s going to have to last seven to 10 years, and legislation changes the legal load requirements on the roads that they run, they want to be ahead of the game. So when they specify trucks, we go over the kind and type of material and steel that we use," says Bradshaw. In other cases, customers base specifications on performance—"The truck needs to do this number of lifts in x number of hours"—and leave it to the manufacturer to figure out how to make the vehicle best meet the performance requirement.

Although he acknowledges that manufacturers can’t predict the future with any greater accuracy than their customers can, Bradshaw points out that a company selling vehicles across the country often has a broader perspective on how legislation and performance requirements are changing. "People look to us to be knowledgeable on what’s happening in the industry. CNG [compressed natural gas] is a perfect example. In a specific area, there might not be any mandate. They can run regular diesel-powered trucks all day long and not have any problem, but they are interested in asking us what we hear, what’s going on in the rest of the world."

Richard Kemner of RDK Truck Sales of Tampa, FL, which specializes in the sale of both new and used refuse equipment, feels that municipalities restrict themselves by the low-bid process. "In most cases, a municipality goes after low bid, but I take a different approach. Most municipalities are forced to try to reckon with the strip-down model due to their bidding. We educate them up front. You may spend another $2,000 getting the right transmission for your application. I’m after their trades. When I sell you the new truck, either today or five years from now, when you get that vehicle back in, that’s when I want it. My main business is the used business, but if I educate a municipality to get the right equipment up front, in the long run, it’ll be better off for me too. Basically, most municipalities have junk bids—that’s what I call them."

Kemner looks toward improving the quality of the equipment that municipalities purchase up front in order to maximize the value of the truck when it comes off the line and goes out the door. "You encourage them to use it as a trade-in. If you don’t need it in your fleet any longer, I encourage you to get rid of it and spec in the right equipment. I’ll tell you what my honest opinion is on any equipment. The biggest thing is to get the right equipment in there for the job, get rid of your problems, cut your maintenance costs, and in the long run, we’ll all be better for it."

Selecting tires with the right combination of traction, long life, and protection can save time, money, and aggravation. This is as true for wheel loaders in a transfer station as for collection vehicles out on the street. Marc McCallum, service manager at Samuels Recycling in Green Bay, WI, says that having the right tires on his Cat IT18B and Volvo L120C wheel loaders is crucial in achieving increased performance and profitability.

"We operate in an environment that is very hard on our drivers as well as our equipment," McCallum says. "Our decision to evaluate tires was based on the cost of downtime and maintenance associated with the one to two flats we were experiencing daily, as well as the cost of scrapping tires after just three or four weeks of use.

"We set up a list of features we had found by experience to be the most important," he explains. "In addition to reduced machine downtime and maintenance, we wanted to make sure we had tires that would provide a smoother ride and better traction performance without any loss of stability—requirements that steered us toward radial tires. After assessing the various requirements, we selected Michelin’s 17.5/R25 X MINE D2s for the job. Since switching to the radials, we’ve logged 6,500 hours on our loader tires and expect to get that much time again out of them once they’ve been recapped."

As more attention is turned toward air-quality concerns and the contribution of diesel exhaust to air pollution, the topic of alternative fuels immediately surfaces. Recent studies by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) relating to diesel exhaust as a possible carcinogen have created a ground swell of interest in alternative fuel systems such as liquid natural gas (LNG) and compressed natural gas (CNG). currently the SCAQMD is looking to adopt a series of rules that would mandate the purchase of alternative-fuel vehicles for municipal fleets and private operators, such as refuse companies working under contract for municipalities. While the jury’s still out on the final outcome of the rule-making process, the impact of such an action will certainly reverberate across the country, affecting how refuse trucks may be specified in the future.

One company that has stepped up to the alternative-fuels plate is Waste Management Inc. Over the last several years, the company has experimented with LNG- and CNG-fueled trucks in two separate regions of the country. At the company’s Washington, PA, operation, a fleet of seven Mack trucks operates on LNG. More recently, the company incorporated a fleet of CNG-fueled trucks at its Palm Desert operation. "We were in the process of renewing a franchise for refuse hauling, and the city was very interested in what we could do to start introducing natural gas trucks into our fleet," explains Kent Stoddard, director of government affairs for the western area based in Sacramento, CA. "The city itself had been really aggressive. The transit district down there has gone to natural gas, and I think the postal vehicles in the area are natural gas, so there’s just been a real push in that particular community to provide for the cleanest conceivable vehicles. We started by getting a grant from the South Coast Air District to introduce natural-gas trucks; we started with 14 that we brought in. Now, once we got into that process, things really started happening at the state level."

State regulation and laws began driving the process, including several lawsuits relating to diesel exhaust. "Several major grocery manufacturers were sued for failing to warn surrounding communities of exposure to diesel exhaust," Stoddard recalls. "More recently, the State Air Resources Board designated diesel particulate as a toxic air contaminant and started a number of regulatory measures to try to reduce exposure to diesel exhaust. Finally, we have the proposal for the South Coast rules that says that public fleets, when they replace or they expand their fleets, shall do so with alternative fueled vehicles. There’s a lot of regulatory activity that has come about while we started demonstrating whether or not natural gas would work in our industry. We’re going to gain as much experience as we can with the cleanest fuels available, and we ultimately don’t know where all this is going to end up: natural gas, compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, clean diesel, hybrid, electric hybrids, ultimately fuel cells—let your imagination run wild. We do know that there’s tremendous pressure to develop and use the cleanest fuels that are technologically feasible in our industry."

Waste Management worked with manufacturers to develop the engines and fuel systems needed to make CNG/LNG a reality. "We try to work closely with our engine and chassis manufacturers to really figure out what they could give us," Stoddard points out. "We were so far ahead of the curve that it wasn’t necessarily ‘what we want,’ it’s ‘what in the world can you guys give us?’ We started with a gas engine and there was a whole bunch of issues—fouling plugs, some starting problems, and overheating problems. That was kind of the first-generation engine. Then we got to a second-generation engine, and for the manufacturers and us, we learned as we went. Now we’ve probably reached the point where we’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the engines we’re running. There were issues that came up, but working with the manufacturer, we got through all those to the point that now we don’t think a lot about those trucks being different or a weird or unusual part of our fleet. They’re now integrated into the fleet. We run them every day. They’re front-line vehicles. We expect the same performance out of them that we do our diesel fleet, and I would say we’re really getting it. So the distinction that they’re somehow experimental is, I think, to a large extent gone, and now they’re just a little different."

Stoddard says that as alternative fuels become a part of the specifications for collection trucks, training of both drivers and mechanics is important to the program’s success. "We want everybody to understand what kind of properties the fuel has." Safety training and monitoring systems within the shops are part of the infrastructure needed to support alternative fuels. "We have to make sure we’re building in the time so that the mechanics are really comfortable and understand both the diagnostic side of it as well as how to do the necessary maintenance work and repairs," he stresses.

Stoddard is very excited about the potential for alternative fuels in the future but warns that the infrastructure to fuel these vehicles must be factored into the equation. "I think very few operators would want to immediately convert their whole fleet. You start by introducing these vehicles into your fleet, which does present a problem because you’re not using enough fuel to really warrant building your own onsite fueling station. What’s critical early on is figuring out how to partner with some other fleet or municipality that might be using natural gas or thinking about going to natural gas so that you at least have a temporary fueling option. You’re looking for an arrangement where, once you have enough trucks and you’re using a fair amount of fuel, you partner with an independent fuel provider that will front the capital, and you enter into a long-term fueling contract so you’re not having to front your own capital. You’re simply amortizing that over a 10-year fueling contract. Frankly, with today’s diesel prices, those contracts look pretty good. You might even save some money."