November/December 2011
Software programs that make use of cell phone, wireless Internet, and other technologies can help scrap facilities with truck routing, container tracking, and other fleet-management tasks.
By Ken McEntee
The emergence of wireless and cellular Internet technology has changed the way we live—and now the same technologies are changing the way we work. The smartphone in your pocket makes it easy for you to check your e-mail, stay connected with friends on Facebook, or read today’s headlines, no matter where you are. But it and similar devices—and the software designed for them—also can help you manage your scrap company’s trucks and containers more efficiently and in real time. Whether they’re standalone software products or components in multi-faceted scrap-management systems, these fleet-management tools have the potential to save time, money, and customer relationships.
Fleet Management Benefits
A common theme among scrap recyclers who use fleet-management software is the need to monitor their containers and make their drivers more efficient. “The biggest benefit our customers get is container tracking,” says the vice president of sales for a company that makes fleet-management software for the recycling industry. “There are a lot of scrap businesses that don’t even know how many bins they have, let alone where they are. I have had customers tell me that they haven’t bought a single roll-off for three years since they started using our software. Previously they were buying 10 new ones a year.” That could save a company tens of thousands of dollars each year, he points out.
His product uses bar coding to keep track of the containers. Every container the scrap company owns gets a rugged, polyethylene bar-code label; every driver gets a handheld computer with a bar-code scanner and wireless access. “Any time [drivers do] anything with a bin—load it, unload it, drop it off, pick it up, reposition it—they scan it,” the vice president explains. “That information [gets transmitted] to the office and creates a real-time record of where that container is and what its status is.” This creates greater efficiency in container placement, he says. “Suppose you just got a call for a 30-yard roll-off, and you don’t have one in the yard. You can go on the computer and see whether you have one sitting in a customer’s lot where it isn’t being utilized. You can pull it out of there and reposition it into a location where it’s going to make you some money.”
Better tracking of drivers and routes is a benefit as well, this supplier says. “If you can make your drivers more efficient, it is a huge gain [for] your bottom line. Conservatively, it costs $60 an hour to operate a roll-off [truck]. If you can save just one hour per driver per day, you’re looking at up to $50,000 a month in savings on some of the larger fleets.”
Louis Padnos Iron & Metal Co. (Holland, Mich.) primarily uses its fleet-management software to manage containers and route drivers, says Dana Devries, a customer service representative for the company. Padnos dispatches a fleet of 55 trucks from two of its eight locations. “It has made our routing more efficient,” Devries says. “Most of our drivers get in before the dispatcher in the morning. When they get in, the schedule is all laid out for them from the night before.” Drivers are equipped with handheld computers and Nextel push-to-talk phones that allow instant communications with dispatch.
Before Padnos installed fleet-management software in January 2010, “we were using handwritten driver sheets and an in-house truck [tracking] computer system we developed but were not terribly pleased with,” Devries says. “You need to have instantaneous communication with the drivers, and that system didn’t have it. At the end of the day, the driver would download everything he did for the day. But it wasn’t as efficient as having that data go into the system in real time, and it didn’t tell us where the driver was at any point in time.”
In 2004, the River Metals Recycling facility in Crescent Springs, Ky., a subsidiary of The David J. Joseph Co. (Cincinnati), served as the pilot site for a fleet-management system designed for the scrap industry. DJJ is now equipping all of its facilities in the United States with the software system, according to the vendor. A case study the vendor provided describes the situation the company faced before implementing a fleet-management program. A single dispatcher was responsible for keeping track of routing tickets for as many as 50 drivers. The daily check-in process took as long as two hours. The dispatcher had to field phone calls from suppliers requesting pickups, and then, because of poor yard visibility, he or she often had to walk through the yard to see which containers were available for a particular driver. At the end of each day, hundreds of drivers’ trip tickets landed in the clerical department, where workers had to transcribe scribbled entries into an accounting system.
The fleet-management system automated all of these activities. Drivers now go directly to their trucks when their shifts begin and download their day’s schedule into their handheld computers. Morning dispatch takes just 15 minutes. Yard visibility is no longer an issue; dispatchers can now check their computer screens for a real-time display of the company’s container inventory. The program not only tracks drivers in real time, it logs the arrival and departure times for each driver along with the odometer reading and pickup weight. The system knows when a driver has crossed a state line and will automatically log a separate odometer reading for fuel-tax reporting.
Software Features
The fleet-management market consists of stand-alone software, either designed for the scrap industry or used in a variety of industries, as well as fleet-management modules from companies that design multifaceted scrapyard management software systems. (Some of those scrapyard management systems have partnered with a standalone software product to offer it as part of their systems.) The management systems typically have various modules to handle tasks such as accounting, inventory control, and database management. The systems are “a lot like the Microsoft Office Suite,” explains the president of a company that produces one such product. “You can buy just Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, or you can buy the whole Office package. With us, you can buy only a fleet management component or a routing component,” or a set of components to manage more aspects of scrapyard operations.
Before choosing a vendor for fleet-management software, first determine what features your company needs. Options include the following:
--Global positioning system-based tracking of vehicles and/or containers, with which dispatchers can locate vehicles at intervals they specify, plan routes, and reroute trucks to make up for missed locations or additional service requests.
--Other types of container and trailer tracking, such as pickup and delivery scheduling, load reporting, and invoicing. One software company CEO points out that his product “tracks how often you go to the customer [and] the volume of each kind of metal you get from each, then it will proactively predict when the next collection should be made.” Doing so, he says, “will prevent the angry customer from calling for you to empty an overfilled container. By tracking each driver and each customer, you also can monitor to make sure that all of the material that is picked up makes its way back into your yard.”
Another provider of scrap-management systems says his product merges fleet management and dispatching by setting up a dispatch ticket to an industrial account. “It says what containers are full, or what materials to bring back if [the customers] don’t use containers. The dispatch ticket goes right into the driver’s inbox. It tells him what needs to be done and when. It also generates a purchase ticket based on the dispatch ticket. So when you drop off an empty container and buy the old one and its materials, the full record is on the ticket and in the system.”
--Vehicle monitoring, to collect data about the speed of the truck, the number of stops the truck has made since the last stop, and the total time on a route, among other things. “In addition to collecting route data, you also can collect all of the truck’s diagnostics,” says a representative of one fleet-management software company. “If an engine light goes on, you know it. If the driver is hard braking, you know it. If the driver is idling excessively or speeding, you know it.”
--Maintenance management, for recording and scheduling preventive maintenance, maintenance work orders, fuel ticket recording, and inventory control. “Our fleet-management software is geared toward maintaining the health of the fleet, whether it’s rolling or non-rolling stock,” says the CEO of a scrap-management software company. “Maintenance of trucks, balers, forklifts, and other equipment is increasingly complicated. Our software lets you track the costs of assets from purchase to maintenance; it tracks all preventive maintenance and nonscheduled repair work that is done on the unit. Using a bar-code reader, it keeps inventory of all parts used on the unit and automatically orders replacements, and it tracks the people who repair and operate that equipment, including driver logs and DOT compliance.”
Some systems offer Web portals for customers to schedule pickups and deliveries, tie into billing and accounting functions, or make use of portable or truck-mounted computers, bar-code technologies, and more (as described above) to extend the scrap-management system all the way to the truck and driver. “Especially with the value of scrap being high, more generators are weighing their own materials,” says one software company CEO. “Our handheld device has Bluetooth capability to get the reading from the customer’s scale. So when the truck comes back over your scale, you know what it had better weigh.”
The costs of implementing and operating fleet-management software will vary according to the size of a company and the tasks the software is designed to do, these vendors say.
More Streamlined Options
Not all scrap managers are sold on the need for all the features of fleet-management software. For some companies, a basic GPS monitoring system is enough, or at least it’s a good starting point. Some simple GPS tracking programs require little software and rely on free Web mapping applications, like Google Maps or Microsoft Bing Maps. Vendors of more complex GPS programs install software on a company’s computer system and charge a licensing fee for its use. Some of these programs can interface with popular accounting or management programs on common platforms. The ability for a scrap recycling business to monitor its drivers from the office improves efficiency and saves a lot of money, vendors say. “Just installing a simple GPS module on a collection truck can make a driver 25 percent more efficient,” says the national sales manager for a maker of fleet-management software. “It’s a psychological thing. Just knowing that he can be tracked will make a driver more efficient. GPS is valuable in being able to watch where your trucks are.”
Freedom Metals (Louisville, Ky.) started using a GPS monitoring system to track its 30 trucks this past spring, says David Atherton, the company’s transportation and safety manager. “It’s basically a Web-based map program that shows us where our trucks are, where they have been, [and] how long they have been sitting idle,” he says. “If a truck goes over 65 or 70 miles an hour, there is an alert. Or if the truck is sitting in one place for 30 minutes, we are alerted.” The cost to install it was about $200 to $250 per truck.
In the past few months, the company has added a fleet maintenance software package, Atherton says. “It alerts us when preventive maintenance is due as well as annual inspections. It has also solved our paper-flow problems and some accountability issues we were having. All of the driver’s daily inspections are logged in for each vehicle, and if there are repairs to be made by our maintenance department, we can track when the problem was reported, who reported it, when it was repaired, and who made the repairs. It will be an invaluable source of information if we are ever chosen for a DOT audit,” he points out. As the company grows, Atherton says, it might look into more comprehensive systems. “We’ve grown from 10 trucks three years ago to 30 today, with 35 drivers running two shifts,” he says. “As we continue to grow, there will be a need for more software to do more things.” Specifically, he would like a product that can account for quick route changes. “It’s nice to give a driver a list of stops for the day on a computer,” Atherton says. “But that doesn’t do much when a customer calls and wants an immediate pickup.”
Can fleet-management systems accommodate such spur-of-the-moment requests? One scrap-management software CEO says no, which is why his company doesn’t try to offer a routing component. “There are too many variables involved in routing for a scrap business,” this CEO says. “For a lot of our customers, a [supplier] gets on the phone and starts screaming to ‘get over here right now.’ That’s the routing system [they] use. The reason the software doesn’t solve the problem is that the dispatcher basically has to get on the horn to the driver, pull a new container from the yard, and deliver it right away. That’s where routing goes out the window.” Yes and no, says another software vendor. “Normal routing-algorithm software does not fit the scrap industry,” he points out, because scrap drivers often can’t go from one customer straight to the next—they have to bring the material from the first one back to the yard due to its bulk, weight, or container size. And whatever route optimization the software can provide goes out the window when the dispatcher makes a sudden change in response to a customer request. But this vendor says his software can adjust routes on the fly. “Say a driver has a list of stops, one to five, and he’s on trip No. 1,” he explains. If a customer calls and requests an immediate pickup, the dispatcher “can input this call and put it in slot two, not slot six.” The system then sends a message to the driver that it has resequenced his trips and provides the new information. “It doesn’t take 10 seconds for the dispatcher to do that,” he says.
Of course, some scrap companies prefer not to deal with trucks at all. “Our experience is that our customers either view their truck fleets as a necessary evil, or they view their truck fleets as a profit center and want them to operate at a very high standard,” a software company CEO says. “A certain segment of the market has divested themselves of trucking operations. They don’t want to deal with the regulations and insurance headaches.” That’s the case with Utah Metal Works (Salt Lake City). Like Freedom Metals, Utah Metal Works recently installed GPS tracking on its fleet of just two trucks. It uses those trucks for local accounts and uses contract haulers for longer runs, says UMW President Mark Lewon. “We’re not large enough for routing software to make sense,” Lewon says. By hiring contract haulers, the company transfers most of the burden of fleet management to its contractors and keeps its focus on other business matters.
Ken McEntee is editor and publisher of The Paper Stock Report and Paper Recycling Online (www.recycle.cc).
Software programs that make use of cell phone, wireless Internet, and other technologies can help scrap facilities with truck routing, container tracking, and other fleet-management tasks.