FleetSMARTS – What We Learned at Waste Expo 2017
Waste Expo is a great event for learning – not just conference learning, but also learning from our many one-on-one discussions with municipal waste managers and private haulers. These interactions help us to understand what your real priorities and issues are, and how these are shaping your budgets.
We’d like to share our key takeaways from the event:
1. SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY
There was much talk at the Expo of how the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics fatal injury figures show the waste and recycling sector is getting more dangerous. In fact, refuse and recyclable material collectors were the fifth most dangerous profession in 2015 with a fatal injury rate of 38.8 per 100,000 workers. And this trend is not improving.
So, safety was on everyone’s mind, and most of the folks that visited our booth wanted to know how they can better equip trucks and drivers to be safer and gain greater visibility. Video cameras, both inside and around the outside of the truck, were of great interest. Improving driver and pedestrian safety and defending litigation cases were the primary reasons given for wanting to deploy DVR systems.
2. ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTIONS
More and more waste fleet managers were looking for comprehensive “smart” truck solutions – essentially a truck that comes with onboard computing and back-office software systems pre-installed. While there are many partial solutions available on the market, fleet managers are shying away from the complexity of trying to get multiple solutions to work together, and are instead looking for the ease and simplicity of a single, integrated approach.
These new, integrated smart trucks make a compelling offering for waste management organizations as they come pre-installed with an onboard computing system (OBC), mobile digital video recorders (DVRs), camera systems and software solutions for fleet tracking, route management, inventory management, billing interfaces, enterprise reporting and much more. And they are much easier to support, service and upgrade.
3. BIG DATA & IMPROVED INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Data – its collection and better use thereof – was another big topic. The great thing about technology and being able to connect so much of the waste management process in the cloud, is that we now have unprecedented access to valuable data. The problem is that there is often so much of it. And it typically requires hours spent poring over countless reports to identify meaningful trends and anomalies for better decision making. Often, the process is simply too time-consuming to undertake effectively – or it requires extensive IT support – so the required monitoring and analysis is not done. While big companies have the resources to conduct broad-based data gathering, research and analysis, your typical waste fleet operation doesn’t have these resources.
So, we talked a lot to folks about fleet management dashboards that can now provide you with a single interface into a variety of enterprise and safety operations information specific to unique fleet operations requirements. These dashboards are typically designed to track key fleet and driver performance indicators (KPIs) to flag any potential problem areas. This means you no longer have to pull the data from multiple sources, analyze it and extrapolate key findings—a fleet management dashboard can easily track and distil the information you need and display it in real-time to identify and solve problems faster, improve operational efficiency, align your organization, show vehicles’ status and anticipate maintenance, spot costly and unsafe driver maneuvers, and identify service anomalies over time.
A big and hearty thank you to everyone who dropped by to see us at Waste Expo in New Orleans! We were delighted to see both old friends and make many new ones.
In closing, we would like to hear from you on these or other important themes. We welcome your feedback and insights!
Don Diego Padilla
VP Sales, FleetMind Solutions