Company: Knight Waste Service, Fort Worth, TX
Operation: A privately held, minority-owned waste service company utilizing 30 automated side load trucks, including four diesel and 26 compressed natural gas models, to provide 94,000 households per week with garbage and recycling services
PROBLEM:
Communities often hire waste service providers for garbage and recycling services. Increasingly, though, those communities are now expecting returns from those third-party services to be documented with data trails.
That was the situation Knight Waste Services found itself in recently. “We needed the means to report to our municipal counterparts that we were effectively providing the service levels we were contracted to perform,” says Richard L. Knight, operations manager. “As their needs for more complete reporting increased, we turned to technology to provide a solution for that need.”
Initially, Knight Waste Service went with a “canned message tagging system,” Knight explains. “[It] merely matched street address data, as provided by our municipal partner. We needed better accuracy and the ability to capture images to reduce the likelihood of being asked to return to provide repeat service to the same address.”
SOLUTION:
Knight Waste Services turned to McNeilus. Known for its waste truck bodies, the company also provides additional parts and service support. One of those offerings, the Street Smart Vision solution, seemed like a potential fit.
“We did a pilot test on two trucks for approximately three months. We quickly determined that the system would be invaluable for improving efficiencies in our operations, allowing remote viewing of problematic behaviors, and providing more effective accident/incident investigations,” Knight says.
Full utilization of the system went into effect the first week of June.
“We expected the system to be user- friendly for the drivers and enable us in the office to better coach appropriate driving behaviors,” Knight explains. “An additional side benefit was being able to see a visual ‘breadcrumb’ trail of vehicle activities throughout the day.”
Street Smart Vision provides real-time, continuous video surveillance and vehicle tracking, route management software and a DVR, vehicle systems diagnostics, and fork and tipper scale integration. The solution is available with 7-, 9- or 10.4-in. monitors and up to five cameras. It can help reduce maintenance costs and fuel consumption, improve diagnostics, and improve visibility into truck and driver behavior.
“The system is able to interface with different reporting applications that give us vehicle metrics, collection cycles, collection data by customer location, etc.,” says Knight. “We now have real-time video feed with archive and playback capability, which is immensely helpful with incident investigations. It has already saved us thousands of dollars in potential claims and dozens of man-hours in investigation.”
Compared to previous systems the company has used, Knight has been impressed. “The Street Smart Vision system is ‘yards’ above what we have used in the past and continues to yield positive results daily. In my opinion, it has proven to be the ‘most complete’ technology solution for our needs.”
