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Improving efficiency

March 10, 2014
Data integration is helping Sacramento boost fleet productivity

Keith Leech has served as fleet manager for the City of Sacramento since 2006 and for nearly 30 years has held management positions in the city’s public works and general services departments.  “There have been a lot of changes over that time,” Leech says.  “Today, we have business intelligence to make data-driven decisions that support continuous improvement of our fleet operations.”

The City of Sacramento fleet of 2,300 vehicles used by fire, solid waste and recycling, transportation, and parks and recreation departments includes 115 refuse trucks. The newest American LaFrance and Autocar models, with bodies from New Way and Wayne Engineering, are powered by Cummins ISL G natural gas engines and fitted with Allison MD3000 automatic transmissions.

In 2009, the Sacramento City Council awarded a five-year contract for the purchase of the Zonar telematics platform and Electronic Vehicle Inspection Report (EVIR) on 100 refuse trucks and the integration of the solution with the city’s FleetFocus M5 maintenance management system from AssetWorks.  The city’s fleet is maintained at five shops by 38 mechanics and 20 equipment service workers.

With the integrated systems, vehicle data is captured on EVIRs.  The onboard telematics system transmits the information to Zonar servers, which makes it available to maintenance operations through FleetFocus, and automates the work order creation process.

“When a refuse truck develops a mechanical issue out on its route, our department will know about it even if the driver doesn’t,” Leech explains, “and we often have a work order before the truck has returned to the shop. Downtime reductions are hard to quantify, but my feeling is that since the operators can’t perform inspections from the driver’s seat, we’re getting better defect reporting and we’re heading off failures.”

Each refuse truck equipped with the EVIR system also has a handheld unit that the driver uses to perform inspections.  The driver scans RFID tags at each inspection zone on the vehicle and indicates the status.  The handheld device then transmits inspection results to the shop.  “The integration also helps us educate the solid waste management department on the importance of thorough driver inspections,” Leech adds.  “Before, there was no mechanism to hold drivers accountable when their inspection reports were incomplete or forgotten.

“We’ve also experienced improvements in workflow coordination due to more streamlined diagnostics and having fewer down vehicles in the daytime,” Leech continues.  “That was critical for our shops because our mechanics usually perform maintenance on the refuse trucks when they aren’t running and work on other vehicles during the day.”

Once a job is completed, FleetFocus updates information on the vehicle’s status in Zonar’s Ground Traffic Control software so dispatchers handling non-emergency city services know which units are ready to return to service.  For example, solid waste department dispatchers use GPS technology to see real-time locations of refuse vehicles and re-route trucks when a pickup is missed or for some other need.

The FleetFocus software also tracks all functions related to the maintenance of Sacramento refuse vehicles, including processing of repair and preventive maintenance work orders, capturing operating expenses, and tracking equipment usage, Leech notes.

“The application of all this technology to our fleet has provided more efficient driving routes, a reduction in trip distances, tracking and reporting of idle time, and identification of vehicle problems, resulting in overall improvements in operational efficiency and lower fuel usage of more than eight percent,” Leech states.

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