Routing with efficiency

A recycling operation’s investment in routing software typically will return 5 percent to 15 percent in added route miles, optimize the number of stops and reduce annual overtime hours by 3 percent to 5 percent, according to Cyndi Brandt, senior director of product marketing and strategic alliances for Omnitracs. She works out of the Dallas-headquartered company’s Baltimore office.

Omnitracs’ Roadnet is a Web-based SaaS (software as a service) application that works with smartphones and tablets to monitor driver activities via GPS. The software uses a drag-and-drop interface.

The number of vehicles under management will vary by operation, but on average a fleet needs to have more than five vehicles to make an investment in routing software worthwhile, says Barry Grahek of DesertMicro, Jacksonville, Florida.

DesertMicro’s RouteManager is supported by Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP Pro, Vista, 7 and 8.1. It is available for the single user or for use in a multiuser, multilocation environment.

The routing optimization solution from DesertMicro is available for medium-to-large-size fleets, Grahek says.

However, Marion Davey of RouteOptix Inc., Kitchener, Ontario, says, “There are no [fleet] size limits in determining what benefits can be achieved. Companies with two or three vehicles can benefit, as well as companies with very large fleets.”

Ron Davey, RouteOptix founder, co-wrote software for a solid waste firm he was employed by that was bought out by Allied Waste. He started RouteOptix in 1998 with intimate knowledge of the recycling and solid waste industry.

That company says its software works for a host of service providers, ranging from solid waste to document destruction to liquid waste disposal firms.

Any operation basing its routing on accounting software or profit and loss reporting is a good candidate for routing software, Davey says, particularly if the company has grown recently.

“What was manageable yesterday is probably not effective today,” she says.

“In 2015, the cost per truck dropped below $100 per month for the first time ever,” Grahek says of DesertMicro’s software. “The low cost of Android-based tablets combined with our RouteWarrior app brings this to a short ROI [return on investment] of less than 11 months,” he adds.

Davey says the potential savings from route management software may not be readily visible at first. “A company with five routes may show a good profit on the bottom line … but will discover that four of its routes are quite profitable, and the fifth is bleeding them dry.”

She continues, “Our customers tell us that it will take nine to 12 months to get a return on the investment in the software.”

After that, the extra revenue generated goes straight to the bottom line.

Adding an extra stop or two to an established route can be a proven money-maker. Often, Davey says, RouteOptix customers will find that the software can get 16 stops on the same six-hour shift that used to service only 15 stops. “That accumulates over the weeks, months, years,” she says.

A VALUED ADDITION

Ten years ago when he saw the cost of his routing software, Dean Leask, owner of Contain-A-Way, High River, Alberta, gasped. “I nearly had a heart attack,” he recalls, adding, “$5,000 was a lot of money for one disk back then. But that program has saved us $500,000 since we bought it.”

It was Leask’s father, Ken, who stumbled upon RouteOptix at a recycling show in Las Vegas. Ken has since retired.

Before buying routing software, Leask says he was tracking boxes and routes on paper or on his Palm Pilot. “I had 400 bins out and should have had 200 based on what we could track,” he says. Now, Contain-A-Way manages 1,200 bins without hassle, and Leask says he feels the company could expand to 5,000 bins with the aid of its software.

“If you have a waste company and want to be successful, I guarantee you need something like this,” Leask says.

Max Glikman, operations manager for Mid-Atlantic Clothing Recycling (MAC), Owings Mills, Maryland, agrees.

“We service many locations with collection containers,” he says, adding that MAC has collection bins in six states, many in recycling centers next to traditional paper, glass and plastic recycling bins; others are in shopping centers and the like.

“We are industry leaders in doing things the right way,” Glikman says. “Software helps us manage and collect our routes.”

Each of MAC’s collection bins has a tracking number, and every bin’s weight and location are pinpointed using the company’s Roadnet software from Omnitracs.

MAC’s drivers also use Roadnet to track the weight of each container at pickup. Some containers are emptied three or four times per week, while others might be emptied every-other week.

MINDING THE DETAILS

“A company with five 10-stop routes faces 37.26 quadrillion ways to sequence those 50 stops,” Brandt says.

Add on vehicle capacity considerations, customers’ open/close times and driver limitations, and it quickly becomes a mind-boggling array of factors that route managers must take into account.

“The software can take in hundreds of business constraints,” Brandt says.

Being in the Washington, D.C., area, Omnitracs’ Roadnet staff knows how important security clearances are at some collection locations. Good routing software assigns a last-minute job to a driver with the proper clearance, she says.

The software also keeps track of the details of individual trucks, such as length, tonnage and whether it is loaded from the front or the side, and knows that some drivers are more skilled at certain equipment than others. Additionally, software can keep track of customers’ hours and yard clearances and knows whether they are A priority or C priority.

According to sources, good routing software knows the fixed and variable costs for each vehicle. It can figure whether it is more efficient (or even possible) to fill a truck, dump the load—including wait time at the scales—and do the second half of the route or to try an alternative scenario.

Routing software also can help recycling companies develop quotes, track assets from trucks to roll-off boxes, report production and manage customers, sources say, as well as warn the dispatcher whether a commercial customer has paid its bills or is in arrears.

Leask says he loves the fact that when his crew clocks in every morning, route sheets have been generated automatically, and billing is one-touch. Asset tracking also is part of his package.

“We use the software in more ways than what it was designed to do,” MAC’s Glikman says. For one thing, it serves as a time clock for drivers based on their log-in/log-out times, which assists with payroll.

The company’s routing software allows MAC to assure compliance with the Department of Transportation’s 14-hour limit and to see that drivers take rest breaks.

OPTIMIZING OPERATIONS

Basically, route managers can get three kinds of analytical information from their routing software, Brandt says.

The most basic data that can help a hauling operation with its routing—data the industry has worked with for decades—is historical, or descriptive, data. It is easy to gather and tells a route manager what was done last month or last year. However, historical data usually is controlled by one dispatcher—and what happens when that person quits, retires or is sick or injured?

Brandt says predictive analytics determine what likely will happen in the future based on what happened in the past after analyzing an unbelievable amount of data—more than any human could possibly sift through. For instance, once a truck has 50,000 miles on its tires, it will be more likely to get more flats in the future.

Finally, prescriptive analytics tell a hauling operation what to do based on the analysis of the system’s data, she says. Not only can prescriptive analytics give a manager feedback about route miles or fuel costs, they will analyze a given driver’s driving patterns and indicate that he is accident-prone and needs attention from the safety director. Or, they will look at the vehicles in the fleet and see that a diagnostic code indicates it is time to replace the starters on some trucks.

Two major application areas are ripe for optimization, sources say. There is a difference between optimizing the constant variation in pickups on a recycling route that requires a daily tactical plan and optimizing a strategic residential collection route that is pretty much the same every pickup day. The first basically makes up new routes on a daily basis, responding to customer calls and collection needs. The second creates a week’s worth of routes and is targeted to a recycling operation that basically has the same routing schedule every Monday, every Tuesday and so on; changes are required only when a new neighborhood is added to a route. A recycling operation can create a week’s worth of routes at one time based on its current orders.

“Optimization helps to improve overall route time but should be considered as a starting point, as other factors, such as traffic, breakdowns, etc., can impact the route,” Davey says.

RouteOptix integrates with Microsoft Bing Maps to achieve optimization by “Speed” or “Speed with Traffic.” Davey adds that Bing Maps can optimize a range of stops—Stop 3 to Stop 8, for instance— based on service time requests and leave all other stops in place.

RouteOptix calculates statistics gathered from the route, such as number of stops, miles travelled, downtime, service time and more. In addition, these statistics are used to calculate an overall route profit estimate in RouteOptix’s Profitability Report, which includes prorated revenue, service revenue, material costs and revenue, driver, fuel and vehicle cost.

WHAT LAYS AHEAD

Undoubtedly, routing software is headed to the cloud, Brandt says. While Omnitracs’ products are available as on-premises, server-based software and as a cloud offering, Brandt says, “We see using the computing power of the cloud as the next generation.”

She adds, “To shed the cost of maintaining computer systems, our customers are moving to the cloud.”

Davey says, typically, RouteOptix software is server-based because some of RouteOptix’s clients have trepidation about cloud-based software. “A number of our clients are not totally comfortable with the cloud.”

However, RouteOptix’s application can be hosted on the cloud if the buyer wants to go that route.

As analytics have gained in sophistication, it is possible to visualize the data software tracks on maps.

Down the road, Grahek says, the trends are around maximizing productivity while minimizing miles between job sites. “We are now including traffic data and average job site time to arrange as many jobs into a work day,” he says of DesertMicro.

“Everyone talks about big data, but you have to be able to harness it,” Brandt says. “Software lets you take all the diverse elements of your business, sift through them and make actionable change without having to run 52 reports and collate data yourself,” she adds.

Effective routing software will enable meaningful conversations between general management and transportation managers on issues from fuel consumption to labor savings. Most people do not have the time or energy to comb through mountains of data. Analytics can be prescriptive, basically telling management what to do to optimize profits. That makes it worthwhile at least to talk about routing software.

“It makes us more efficient,” Leask concludes. “Bang! It’s on top of everything and it’s all nice and organized.”

The author is a freelance writer based in the Cleveland area. He can be contacted at curt@curtharler.com.