Capturing weight data as quickly as possibleand integrating it with accounting datacan improve throughput, profitability, and strategic decision-making ability.
Such
constraints as available land and fuel costs are making MSW managers more
conscious of operational profitability than ever. As a result, many are working
smarter than ever, not necessarily by investing in new machinery but, instead,
weighing and information automation systems that provide an accurate picture of
how profitably machinery and labor are operating. These data have always
existed, but to many managers, they have been invisible.
Technology such
as onboard scales and information systems that integrate weighing and accounting
data at a glance can dramatically increase the operational profitability of
trucking and facilities—and form an overall operational picture that makes
strategic decision-making smarter and faster than ever. Increasingly, managers
are leveraging the power of information.
Trucks Get “Smarter”
Onboard truck
scales are not a new idea, but with high fuel costs and operations seeking
ever-higher returns on investment, they represent potential for a major leap in
truck time and payload capacity utilization and warrant more consideration than
ever. One onboard scale manufacturer argues that the apparent trend in the waste
industry is that landfills will continue to close due to environmental and
capacity issues, leading to the development of larger regional landfills that
support a greater service area. In turn, this is leading to the construction of
more transfer stations and greater travel distances to the landfill—a trend that
is causing increasing demand for timely, accurate weighing.
Both onboard
scale manufacturers and MSW managers point out that, too often, trash hauler
trucks wait in line for long periods to be weighed by in-ground scales, or loads
are estimated with a safety factor of a fraction of a ton. The latter approach
obviously carries a risk of overloading and thus overweight fines. Onboard
scales eliminate these ill-advised practices because they provide immediate data
feedback and keep trucks doing productive work.
Another key
benefit of onboard scales that measure weight on individual axles is the
elimination of load adjustment and the subsequent need for reweighing on an
in-ground scale. Adjusting the load is very time-consuming task in itself and
may require dumping the load and starting over.
Optimizing
payloads can also increase a fleet’s operating margins by potentially reducing
the number of trips that a trash hauler makes in a day and over the course of a
year. Other margin-widening aspects of onboard weighing include less wear and
tear, not to mention reduced liability.
Solid waste
operations have several options for onboard weighing. They can equip all trucks
and trailers, typically including fifth-wheel load cells on trucks and
center-hanger load cells on trailers. Trucks or trailers with air-ride
suspensions can utilize air sensors, and the vehicle can communicate weights to
a meter in the transfer station, either mounted on a wall or inside a loader,
via either a direct cable or a wireless connection. The wall-mounted meter can
be connected to large scoreboard displays for viewing from a distance.
Alternatively, trucks or trailers can be scaled but not be equipped with a meter
in the vehicle cab. In this configuration, only a direct cable connection to the
meter in the transfer station is possible. A third option for trailers is
equipping with onboard scales and meters a “yard truck” or two to pickup
trailers once they are loaded and take them to the loading areas.
Vulcan On-Board
Scales, a Kent, WA–based manufacturer of onboard scales, has calculated the
return on investment of equipping with onboard scales a tractor and tandem
trailer that have spring suspensions. Vulcan points out that if digital readout
boards and other hardware are required at the transfer station, these costs need
to be added on a per-vehicle basis. Also, if the operator scales only the yard
tractors, the cost of the non-scaled tractors should be deducted from the
average tractor-trailer cost.
Vulcan’s
analysis notes that the situation and cost structure can vary greatly among
transfer stations. For example, some transfer stations never allow overloaded
vehicles to leave the yard and therefore do not get overweight fines and do not
travel to commercial scales. However, in these cases, average payload weights
typically are much lower, and significantly more vehicles require the load
weight to be readjusted. According to Vulcan, operations with haulers running
significantly under the maximum payload weight on average tend to have higher
overtime costs and require more vehicles.
Lonny French,
operations manager for the North Lincoln Sanitary Service in Lincoln City, OR,
says that onboard scales help the service load its five transfer trailers as
close to legal weight as possible. North Lincoln operates both a public transfer
station with drop boxes and a private transfer station serving public drop boxes
and its own route trucks. A large readout indicates weight to the office before
the trailers depart for Waste Management’s Riverbend Landfill in McMinnville,
OR, about 70 miles away.
“We could have
gone with in-floor scales, but under a transfer station with a leaky trailer,
you’ve got to clean those scales,” French notes. “That would be an issue—keeping
things clean and operating, and the expense. The other thing is, we know we’re
getting them up to their legal weight and make as few trips as we can.”
While French
says he cannot precisely quantify the financial impact of onboard scales on
North Lincoln, he provides an example of how much revenue would be lost by
loading his trailers with an underloading safety factor in order to keep them
moving. He cites inputs of 25 tons a load and $13 a ton—or $325 a trip, not
including disposal costs—as well as a capacity shortage of 2 tons per trip. The
revenue recovery possible by using onboard scales would eliminate about one trip
to the landfill out of every 13.
Another
manufacturer, Vishay/SI Technologies, offers multiple onboard weighing
configurations. Two configurations are available for packer bodies: front
fork-based for front-loaders and body-based scales. These systems, which weigh
in increments of hundreds of pounds, are better suited to commercial collection
than residential collection, according to the manufacturer. The Trojan system is
used in many industries and records weight on each axle and on the entire
chassis; the manufacturer says that the system can help MSW operations maximize
payloads and thus minimize the number of trips to the landfill. This system can
be used for residential collection.
Tom Hooks,
senior district fleet manager for central Pennsylvania for Waste Management in
Harrisburg, PA, says that his operation uses both types of packer-body weighing
systems, using front-fork type on two haulers since early 2007 and equipping two
more haulers with the body-based system in early 2008. He says that the accuracy
of the weighing system facilitates billing that is more in line with commercial
customers’ actual refuse weights.
“The primary
reason they were purchased was to determine the average load per customer and
also record heavy loads,” says Hooks. “Some customers continually load the cans
with heavy material that’s far [heavier] than what we’re billing. In some cases,
customers aren’t going to be happy with an increase, but when you show them
documentation, most people are fair-minded and they realize that the more they
put in there, the more they’re going to have to pay.”
Hooks adds that
the onboard scale-equipped trucks are used to set benchmarks for pricing as they
are occasionally used on various routes. “It’s just a good tool for showing
customers what they’re actually getting rid of and documenting it,” says Hooks.
“It’s a way to document what we’re providing so that we can charge a fair
price.”
With the need
for efficiency at solid waste facilities constantly becoming more pressing, a
natural next step after determining load weight as quickly as possible and
customer profitability is that of improving throughput and financial data
processing. As noted by Mettler Toledo, a provider of automation weighing and
accounting technology for industries including solid waste, automating the
weighing and ticketing process with PC-based systems provides a more efficient
overall process with a greater opportunity for increased throughput at the
facility and increased revenues. Adding capabilities to an operation, such as
unattended weighing via driver terminals positioned at the scales, the process
cycle times can be reduced without a corresponding increase in labor
requirements. The result is wider margins between revenues and costs.
Facility Margins Get Wider
Public transfer
stations and landfills are inherently dynamic operations that, at first glance,
appear to lend themselves to refuse collection—but not data collection that can
shed light on opportunities to increase operating margins. In recent years,
several providers have developed systems that allow MSW managers to tie together
financial and operating data that can form a basis of decision-making that make
their operations more efficient and profitable than ever.
One challenge
that landfills face is categorizing and charging for the various types of
incoming refuse. Cardinal Scale’s WinVRS software runs reports of period
histories, material totals, and customer information. Landfills can export data
to other applications, such as accounting and materials control.
Multiple-material transactions can be captured with the program on one
transaction ticket, such as a per-ton price for dumping and a per-unit price for
tires.
WasteWorks
software from Carolina Software is an example of a system that integrates weight
data and financial data so that managers can access information that provides
insight into operations and financial performance at any given time. A
derivative of WasteWorks called WasteWizard is designed to increase productivity
further by enabling unattended ticketing. At this level of automation, such
defaults as tare weight, material type, and material origin are entered into the
company’s system by the driver. Systems such as WasteWizard often have
pre-entered information, such as the tare weight of a given truck, which is
identified by a code number. Storing this kind of information in a waste
operation’s records can drastically reduce transaction time as well as
administrative labor. Carolina Software also offers an image-capture system
called WasteWorks Vision that creates records of past transactions for future
reference.
The WasteWizard
system has three options for drivers to input information. They can use magnetic
stripe cards that identify the customer and vehicle, radio frequency interface
tags mounted on the vehicle, or a flexible keypad device that prompts drivers
for inputs. It is also possible to capture volumetric data, including liquid
waste.
Kathy Goroski,
scale supervisor and recycling coordinator with the city of Helena, MT, notes
that the core accounting system helps the operation track the source of its
refuse at its transfer station, a major advantage for billing and tracking
residential quotas. “Each residential unit within our district is issued a solid
waste permit. They pay a solid waste assessment on their taxes, and for that
they get a permit that allows them to bring in a certain amount of self-haul,”
she points out. “We track roughly 25,000 permits individually every year, and
once they go over the limits they’re billed for any overage.”
The system is
adaptable enough to track different materials and ensure that the right party is
billed,” Goroski says. “We run only about 44,000 to 45,000 tons a year through
our facility, but we have a huge amount of small transactions we have to track.
I’ll use Helena residents as an example. They’re allowed two tons of self-haul
of solid waste annually, and, as an incentive to recycle, we don’t want
recycling to go against the two tons. Just by playing with material codes and
dollar values, we’re able to track the overall material and pull the recycling
out of it so that it doesn’t show up on their bill.
“Once we were
able to track what people were bringing in per resident it was thousands and
thousands of dollars a month that was being paid out of the residential solid
waste fund. The wrong entity was paying for it. The first year we had the
system, we were able to track the weights, and we tied our permits to a geocode
within the system. We had contractors that were bringing in $7,000 to $8,000
worth of waste a year and charging it to a residential account—we had no way to
verify that.”
A recent
consolidation of landfill operations from three to one has meant much more truck
traffic for the Black Hawk County (IA) Solid Waste Management Commission and
Brett Vette, its administrator. The state’s Department of Natural Resources
changed its regulations and closed two of the county’s unlined landfills, and
the commission now operates one facility that processes about 170,000 tons
annually. As a result, the commission has installed second and third outbound
scales and a WasteWizard. “We expect it to take away at least half of our
loads.” There are only three steps, three entries, that need to be made on the
inbound side; and then, on the outbound side, only one entry needs to be made
and the ticket is issued. Our theory is, let’s keep it simple—customer and
vehicle ID and material ID—and we’re only giving them two choices: MSW or
C&D material, and then origin choices.”
Vette reports
that the accounting system has improved billing accuracy as well as financial
analysis capability. “We were hand-writing everything, and then data was entered
into an Excel spreadsheet,” he says. “It worked, but it was inefficient and it
was difficult to make changes. Now the scale is digital, and everything is
entered automatically as far as weights, and it’s really efficient as far as
cash customers. That to me is the biggest thing—the timesaving as far as
billing.
“Also, people
here at the scale house can tell you the tons received to that point in the day,
number of vehicles, number of charge versus cash, all sorts of things. That’s
the great thing about this system; you can break things down in so many ways.
Even with customers, you can generate time reports: how long people are onsite,
when your busy times are. There are bar graphs and pie charts so you can make
presentations to your board of directors, which is looking for that kind of
information.”
Like Black Hawk
County, the Linn County (IA) Solid Waste Agency has had a WasteWizard system
installed at its landfill to increase traffic throughput. The agency, which has
used the core WasteWorks product since 1999, uses the unattended system for
large haulers who routinely visit. Patricia Myers, office manager, notes the
impact that the system has had on yard traffic during peak periods. “I would say
probably more than half of our trucks go through there,” she says. “We have a
lot of traffic from residents on Saturdays, and any time we can get those trucks
out of line it benefits us and our customers.”
Bestway
Trucking, Fontana, CA, is another trucking company that has benefited from
installing an unattended weighing system, in this case from Cardinal Scale. The
driver approaches an in-ground Cardinal EPR truck scale and inputs the truck and
trailer identification information into a 777 indicator’s weatherproof
enclosure. The time and date, truck number, and trailer number are sent to a
remote P500 tape printer in the main office about 600 feet away via wireless
communications. A traffic light changes from red to green and the driver places
the steering axle on the scale. As soon as the weight on the scale exceeds a
preset amount, the traffic light changes from green to red. When motion ends,
the weight is sent to the remote tape printer and the traffic light changes from
red to green. The driver repeats these steps until all of the axles have been
weighed. Once the driver has removed the last axle, a timer prompts the system
to print the total weight of all of the axles.
Baltimore,
MD–based Information Systems Inc. provides scale automation systems that can be
either manned or unmanned. In the manned configuration, the driver enters truck
data on a keypad, or scale house personnel enter the data directly into the
system. In the unmanned configuration, an antenna at the scale house reads data
from a barcode on the side of a given truck using radio frequency identification
(RFID) technology.
The system is
designed to increase the efficiency of routine transactions while freeing staff
to handle exceptional situations. The provider stresses that the idea behind
implementing the system is not to eliminate workers but to free them from doing
routine tasks in favor of such tasks as inventorying mixed loads.
Data Get Richer
If the
collective experience of individuals who spoke with MSW Management about
information automation is any indication, the industry is continually increasing
its operational sophistication. Leveraging the power of information isn’t just
confined to customer profitability and throughput; the rich data can lend
clarity to the performance of an entire operation from a strategic
perspective.
Goroski is
impressed with the accuracy of the information system that the city of Helena
uses and points out that the data it captures also helps management to use its
operational resources wisely. “Through a series of reports when I do the billing
each month, I can actually reconcile a generic report on all inbound material
with all inbound material that’s billed out by customer type and so forth,”
Goroski says. “In a given month, we’re never off by more than a ton between what
comes in versus what gets billed—that’s pretty amazing considering the amount of
transactions we’re doing every month. It just makes us more accountable for
billing.”
The city’s data
does not collect dust, Goroski adds. “When you know how much yardwaste is coming
in, you can determine how much energy to put into a composting operation,” she
argues. “I can do charts or graphs on what days of the week are busiest, what
times of day are busiest. By being able to run reports and base things on
amounts of material and customer types, we can get an idea of which customers
are doing what. Would it be more beneficial to provide a disincentive to bring
in smaller loads, or would it be more beneficial to extend our hours? We’re
doing a PR campaign right now, asking people to wait until they have five bags
of garbage instead of one and avoid the peak times, and without this data we
wouldn’t even know these things.”
Rogue Disposal
of Medford, OR, faces a challenge that is the reverse of that of Goroski and the
city of Helena: improving the throughput of noncommercial customers. “On a
spring day, everybody gets the bug to go out and clean, and we might get 800 to
900 cars through here, so queuing becomes a problem,” says Garry Penning,
manager of strategic planning for Rogue Disposal, which operates one transfer
station and one landfill. Because the transfer station is on a reclaimed
brownfield site, Penning explains, constraints on expansion exist and the
company must make the best use of existing space as it can. As a result, Rogue
Disposal has set up a highly automated system for maximizing the throughput of
homeowners.
A scale house
there uses the Scale-Pak scale house management module of Soft-Pak’s i-Pak
billing, routing, inventory tracking and operations software to eliminate the
need for homeowners to weigh on an outbound scale. The system calculates
homeowners’ loads by volume and by eliminating their outbound weighing
requirements, commercial outbound weighing becomes more efficient. “At this
facility, we have a transfer station with solid waste, and we also have a
recycling process center in the same building, so we don’t have to set up a
second scale and reconfigure our entire traffic patterns,” Penning points out.
“We only have to ‘touch’ [homeowners] once—that benefits us as far as keeping
people going through the facility.”
The Scale-Pak
module integrates weighing data with the main i-Pak system. This integration
provides a central repository of weighing and accounting data, notes Brenda
Jenson, assistant controller. “As far as trying to pull reports and get your
data together, it would otherwise be a lot of exporting and putting data into
spreadsheets—a lot of manual manipulation of data,” says Jenson. “You could look
at the number of customers coming through by hour,” adds Penning. “You can see
your peaks and valleys through the course of a year. You can look at your
tonnage and how it comes through in the course of a day so that you can schedule
your trucking.”
Penning reports
that the company is also using handheld thermal ticket-printing devices in an
effort to further increase throughput at the transfer station. He compares Rogue
Disposal’s use of this technology with that of the rental car industry.
“Everybody’s trying to conserve fuel and everybody’s trying to move volume and
cars through and we want to give them the best customer service,” he points out,
adding that the unit’s ability to process credit card payments would be another
efficiency benefit. “Folks are really starting to look at their idling times.
For our trucks, it’s not just the fuel; if that truck is out on a route, it’s
actually generating revenue as opposed to just sitting there. If you marry all
this data together, it’s great efficiency from an administration
standpoint.”
An operation
like Rogue Disposal, which serves many customers located from 20 to 40 miles
away, can benefit from a strategic use of aggregated data captured from systems
like this. “We’re starting to track our customers by zip code,” Penning says.
“If you’re looking to site new facilities, you can actually see where your waste
volume is coming in. We do that for our own trucks because we route them, but we
don’t know where a load originated from the general public. It’s useful for
locating a new transfer station.
“When you have
a transfer station, landfill, and a collection operation like we do, you’re
trying to tie all that together,” Penning adds. “If you’ve got all that data
together, you can track your tonnages and tie that to your revenues. We can look
at it from a management standpoint and say that we need to start sending more
salespeople out onto the street. We can make management decisions much more
quickly by having all the data in one spot.”
For more
information on weighing and information automation systems, visit these
manufacturers’ Web sites:
Cardinal/Detecto Scale Mfg. Co.
www.cardinalscale.com
Carolina Software
www.wasteworks.com
Loadrite Ltd.
www.loadritescales.com
Mettler Toledo
www.mt.com
Vishay/SI Technologies
www.vishay.com
Soft-Pak Inc.
www.soft-pak.com
Unitec Corp.
www.uniteccorp.com
Vulcan On-Board Scales
www.vulcanscales.com