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By Don Talend

One might argue that the saying “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” describes the move toward process optimization in the solid waste management industry. Just as the industry focuses on cost reduction, and as resources such as labor become less available, the availability and affordability of technological solutions are often increasing customers’ expectations. Until route management information systems gained widespread acceptance, technological advances in trucking made individual parts of operations work more efficiently, but technology didn’t necessarily make entire operations easier to manage. These systems provide a comprehensive operational picture either historically or in real time, allowing solid waste managers to plan strategies cost-effectively and to react tactically to the challenges they face.

This class of information system may consist of any or all of the following components: vehicle location systems (many of which are GPS-based); scheduling and mapping/dispatching software; wireless communications, including onboard or handheld modems; and integration capability with accounting/billing software. Managers at several solid waste disposal organizations report that these systems provide substantial benefits affecting service—as well as the bottom line—in several operational areas.

Optimal Scheduling
Vehicle location data that are obtained by driver reporting (e.g., by pushing a button on an onboard status unit, or by GPS signal) is stored in the computer system and processed later as schedules are developed. Scheduling software is also available that allows the user to input address data and it calculates optimal routes. Managers report that the availability of this data gives them the ability to plan routes more evenly and hold drivers accountable for efficiency.

Will Carpenter, GIS manager with the city of Owensboro, KY, notes how RouteSmart scheduling optimization software has helped the city cut costs.

“[Owensboro] had grown over the years and a new route was piggybacked onto whatever route it was adjacent to,” Carpenter says. “We looked at our routes and said, ‘This is grossly out of balance; let’s make some changes.’ There was no systematic, top-to-bottom attempt to balance the routes within a day or the days of the week, so over time we were getting substantially out of balance. We had no way of being sure of whether we were driving efficient routes, wasting fuel, and putting extra wear on the vehicles.

“One driver would say, ‘I’ve got a harder route—that’s why I’m always the last one in the shop,’ and we had no bearing on the legitimacy of any of those claims. We were operating a large, expensive operation with almost no metrics as to our success or failure. This system allowed us to get objective measurements; if nothing else, it was worthwhile to do because we had a way of comparing routes, balancing the loads, balancing the amount of overtime among our drivers.”

In 2006, Jed Dawson and the city of Paso Robles, CA, began using Routeware’s GPS-based vehicle location system, onboard hardware, and software for scheduling and accounting. The system was already paying dividends after a little more than a month, he reports. The captured vehicle location data and software allow Paso Robles to determine how long it takes for various trucking tasks to be completed, facilitating the task of benchmarking. “We’ve already found that we can see when a certain driver has an easy day one day and then works overtime another day,” he says. “It’s easy for us to identify where he’s been used, what we can do to balance out his workload.” Seeing that a truck has sat idle for an extended period can also open the door to further investigation of why. “There were some other issues where some of our drivers were showing up at the landfill half an hour before it even opened—we had no idea,” Dawson adds. “I don’t know how we didn’t notice that, but now we’re scheduling them to come in a little later. That’s been a good savings there all by itself. There are savings that are dumbfoundingly simple, but you just don’t see them.”

Ryan Hobbs of Texas Disposal Systems, Austin, TX, notes that the company has set up statistical benchmarks for landfill use by utilizing the data captured by its Routeware system. The driver pushes a button on the onboard status unit to mark entry and exit form the landfill. “In the landfill they start the clock when they hit the inbound scales and stop the clock when they hit the outbound scales,” Hobbs says. “We can then go back and say are we running less efficiently, because three months ago we were getting trucks in and out in 19 minutes, and now it’s 39 minutes. “It’s a measurement tool not just for the driver but also for the organization, including the customer service department, which really uses the data to speak intelligently with customers.”

Better Trained, More Efficient Drivers
Managers also report that route management systems make their drivers more efficient, self-sufficient, and cross-functional. The key factor in this transformation is that the availability of new routing information allows drivers to take ownership of their routes and work in the best interest of customers and employers alike.

“It helps in training when we have drivers driving other people’s routes, because they don’t have to find their own way,” says Carpenter. “We send them to the field with turn-by-turn directions, similar to what you’d have from start to finish with a Mapquest. They get a document like that, but along with “Turn left at Oak Street,” they get a list of addresses. In addition to that, we send them into the field with a color map so they can see their path highlighted like you’d get with AAA. With a text-based and graphic-based reference to the driver, it’s much easier for them to centralize and execute the route and become proficient.

In 2006, the city of Paso Robles, CA, beganusing a GPS-based vehicle location system.

“It has also provided the opportunity to have an objective measurement of driver performance,” Carpenter continues. “Whereas some were conscientious and very diligent and others less so, without an objective measurement—because every route was unique—we really didn’t know whether one route really was more difficult than another. Was there less than optimal performance in the field? We really didn’t know.”

Carpenter and managers with the city of Owensboro further optimize the routes by relying on drivers to add their human knowledge to the scheduling. “The way the superintendent has used the software is to say, ‘This is what the system has predicted; this is what has been proved by drivers in the field. If you think you can perform better than what the system predicts, show me that you have a better way. If it works, great: We’ll adopt it. If it doesn’t work, we know that you can complete this route in this time at a minimum.’ So the drivers have come to respect and appreciate the efficiencies that have been built into the system. That was one of the key advantages of the system; it wasn’t just something that the eggheads from IS came up with; it was developed in close concert with the drivers. The system might tell you to turn left at a given intersection, but the driver knows that it’s virtually impossible to get a truck across four lanes of traffic when the system thinks you should be able to do it in a heartbeat...some of those adjustments have been taken into account.”

Ciro Viento, operations manager for the commercial and residential waste hauler Automated Waste Disposal, of Danbury, CT, says that the @Road GeoManager iLM fleet tracking and fleet management system acts as a check on drivers’ knowledge of their routes. “We print out reports. There are about 12 different reports that we run, and we’ve had two reports made just for us,” he says. “We review the reports daily, weekly, or monthly, depending the situation. We’ve made adjustments to our routes accordingly. On paper, you can’t tell how far it is to the next location; the numbers may be close together, and it may appear that the guy is doing the route in the most expedient way, but you can actually see it on the map, see the guy out there actually doing it. You can see on the report how long it took him to get to the next stop and the next stop—maybe that stop is better served on a different route.”

Intelligent Dispatching
Perhaps the most noticeable day-to-day impact that route management systems have had on operations, managers note, pertains to dispatching. Since their companies have adopted optimization technology, dispatchers have begun to manage drivers from a customer service—as opposed to driver—perspective. This is because these systems provide dispatchers with strategic information they previously did not possess, and tactical decisions become the exception rather than the rule. When tactical adjustments are necessary, however, the available information allows dispatchers to make an informed decision based on the optimal scenario.

“Dispatchers, in my mind, have become management professionals,” says Hobbs. “Everything is wireless: Work orders are wireless, instructions [for drivers] are wireless. Prior to this, drivers were pulling over, ‘OK, give me the work order, the box number, the special instructions, etc.’ It would take them 10 minutes to write all that down and, as we know, not everyone’s handwriting is the best. Now, we send the instructions over a wireless network. Dispatchers are now watching the screens and watching the overall movement. They start to see patterns and trends, and the dispatcher gets on the radio and says, ‘Hey, you’re supposed to be on Avenue A at 6:30 and it’s now 7 o’clock; is there something going on?’ They’re more knowledgeable of how a route runs, and they manage it—they’re true logistics managers.”

Paso Robles’ Dawson says that its system allows the dispatch department to manage exceptional situations and hold drivers accountable. “You can run a bunch of different reports,” he says. “What I’ve found most useful is color mapping. It’ll show trucks as different colored dots, and, if the vehicle didn’t move for a certain amount of time, you can put the time in there. Occasionally, I’ll call up a truck and I’ll see 30 minutes; hopefully, that’ll be their lunch break. Maybe I’ll see more than their lunch break, and I can look and see if the truck was broken down or what caused that pause in service. It’s something I can use to identify issues that are easy to take care of. That, right away, results in increased revenue.”

Cutting Costs, Capturing Revenue
Where these systems’ optimization capability really makes a difference is on the bottom line. For-profit businesses report that formerly missed revenue opportunities now are captured, while the city of Owensboro’s Carpenter says that the systems help reduce operating costs and allow the city to hold rates steady.

“We went from seven routes a day to six,” he says, “so that’s 14% fewer routes that we’re running. And we were running nine and a half trucks; we dropped it to eight and a half—that’s a 15% reduction. Also, we were driving 780 miles a day, and we’re down to 700 miles a day. Boil all of that down before gas prices increased the past 18 months, and we were projecting savings of $117,000.”

The optimization was simply too difficult for humans to determine, he adds. “What this allowed us to do is take that large, 23,000-customer pile and divide it up into more or less equivalent piles in terms of the amount of service stops, and the software allows us to estimate our drive times to serve every one of those stops, and it predicts what will be the most efficient routes for those stops...it was a way of evening out the days, not just by toter count, but evening the days by combined empty time and drive time. That was too complicated for us to determine previously.”

The system has also allowed the city to optimize its rates, Carpenter adds. “We adjusted about 3,000 customers out of that 23,000. We normally operate on a five-year rate schedule where we run a surplus for two, break even for one and run deficits for two to come out even at the end of five. We’ve been able to project that we can charge the same rates for 10 years because of the savings we’re getting.”

Texas Disposal Systems’ Hobbs points out the many hidden revenue opportunities that the company’s system now helps to identify. Just as important, the company’s Routeware BackOffice scheduling, dispatching, and accounting software allows the company to identify the conclusion of a job and invoice it.

“Sometimes jobs weren’t being billed, because management wasn’t being made aware of them,” Hobbs relates. “Profitability was being watered down through inefficiencies and poorly managed routing. Some jobs weren’t being billed. We know it’s out there; this helped us to identify them.

The classic example is behind a shopping center, where you have maybe 40-, 50-, 60% of the containers behind them,” Hobbs continues. “Maybe you’ve got a new driver who figures the easiest way to reduce customer complaints is to pick everything up. It’s easy for customers to put containers out, so drivers know they’re responsible for picking up everything, but they don’t know who’s being billed, who’s current on their bill, etc. This system takes this all out of their hands.

“In many companies, open work orders fall through the cracks. We’re finding that just managing our work orders just so that they’re billed 100% of the time is assisting our accounting function. We feel we’re called and asked to provide a service, we know we’ve provided a service, but we haven’t gone in and said we did it on this date and at this time. To try and go back and try to bill a customer for a job that was done three months ago presents a whole litany of issues in and of itself. We find that we are closing out our work and being paid for it—that starts with dispatch. Accounting’s not gonna come down and ask if your driver picked up X, Y, and Z; they bill what’s in the system. ”

Viento of Automated Waste Disposal notes that the company’s system has helped him reduce overtime. “Our primary concern when we purchased the system was to get a better handle on our overtime,” he says. “We have 200 to 230 vehicles under the @Road system. There are four or five supervisors—it’s impossible for four guys to be in 200 places at once. The first three months, we cut our overtime by two-thirds. The overtime that we saved after having the system for about three months more than paid for the system.”


	Manufacturers Offer Hardware, Software Choices

Maintenance Benefits
The data that route management systems compile can also provide benefits to an operation’s maintenance department. “The service department uses it because sometimes a truck will break down and the driver will call in and say, ‘I don’t know where I am,’” Viento reports. “There are rural areas we service where the local community may call a road one thing and the state highway will call it something else. The service guy will go into the service manager’s office, he’ll bring up the system, punch in the truck number, and it’ll tell him exactly where it is and it’ll print up directions right to where the truck is.

You also have situations in maintenance where the truck isn’t broken down, but slowed,” he continues. “He might have a flat tire that he doesn’t have to sit still for, but he can continue to provide service.” The service manager can then guide a maintenance worker to where the still-mobile truck. “We can also tell how long a truck has been down and justify the driver’s time,” Viento adds.

Hobbs has had a similar experience, noting that his company’s system allows drivers to mark legitimate downtime. “If a driver breaks down, he immediately hits a screen and starts a timer,” he says. “Once the maintenance shop gets him up and running from a flat tire or whatever, it stops the clock and we therefore can go back and look. The driver might have been only nine miles from our maintenance shop and it took two hours to get him back up and running, and we can ask, ‘What’s going on there?’”

Hobbs adds that he is seeing aspects of the system that management was not aware of before. “We received some reductions in our [insurance] premiums because we now have driveline sensors in our trucks,” he says.

Leaving the Paper Trail In the Dust
Situated north of Dallas and Fort Worth, the city of Denton, TX, forms the peak of an area known locally as the Golden Triangle. Denton’s solid waste department provides a wide variety of services for the three cities’ 100,000 residents, including residential and commercial waste collection, recycling programs, and a comprehensive landfill.

In 2004, as part of the department’s commitment to “exploring and implementing new technologies in waste collection,” Denton chose to utilize Paradigm Software’s routing system software. According to Liza Good, solid waste manager for the city of Denton, “Paradigm has worked with us to try to fulfill our requests as far as what things we needed, and said, ‘okay, can we do this.’”

Jackie Barlo, vice president at Paradigm Software, explains the routing software by contrasting the new system to traditional routing and billing, which relied in large part on radios and a paper trail.

“It gets away from the manual process that everyone was doing before, where it was all done by hand. So a call would come in, someone would manually write it down on a piece of paper, and then that paper would get shuffled through maybe two or three people before it finally got to the driver to be processed.”

With the routing software, all activity is entered and accessible on a real-time basis. As a result, says Barlo, no matter who receives the call, “You don’t have to worry about the piece of paper getting over to accounts receivable in order for it to get billed. It’s all in one location, able to be sent electronically to all parts of the system.”

Identifying Top Customers
A final benefit that Texas Disposal Systems has reaped from its route management system is the ability to categorize customers according to how efficiently drivers can make their pickups. “All customers are not created equal,” he notes. “A 4-yard pickup at a convenience store is going to take a heck of a lot less time than picking up 4 yards of concrete.

“From that standpoint, the sales department has a better understanding of who our optimal customers are. It’s a selling feature; in our industry, we’re often viewed as a commodity—who’s got the lowest price? We don’t compete on that strategy; we compete from a service strategy, so we can go out and start justifying why our prices are a certain way. That’s a selling feature that reduces that commodity mindset for someone in our industry. You’re more protective of the good customers. The ones that aren’t good customers, oftentimes they’re the deadbeats who don’t pay on time.”

Communications specialist Don Talend resides in West Dundee, IL.

MSW - January/February 2007