Leaving the flock behind

Harrisonburg, Virginia, is a growing, increasingly urban city of more than 53,000 people in the Shenandoah Valley. The city’s waste department serves citizens throughout the historic city, using a fleet of nine trucks to perform residential collections.

Looking to improve its collection operations, the city partnered with Rubicon, a New York City-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner that provides waste and recycling software solutions for global businesses and governments through its RubiconSmartCity software as a service (SaaS) solution. The solution uses the Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to collect and store vehicle data, enabling an internet of things waste collection fleet.

Pain points

With the new software, the department had a few things it wanted to correct in its waste collection operations. To start, it lacked established routes, instead relying on what Conor Riffle, senior vice president of SmartCity for Rubicon, called a “flock” approach that often led to longer routes and negatively affected residential services. With the flock approach, there were no set routes for residential service, and drivers had to coordinate with each other to service homes within a certain zone on a certain day, according to Rubicon. 

“This is fairly common in smaller cities but often results in inefficiencies, especially in fast-growing cities since drivers can miss streets and spend unnecessary time ‘looking’ for trash to pick up,” Riffle says.

The city says it also was concerned about fuel costs and worker safety.  

“There were a lot of inconsistencies with the service, and we’d regularly receive dozens of complaints every morning about missed pickups or other issues,” says Harsit Patel, support services manager for the city of Harrisonburg. “We knew we were wasting a lot of fuel every day because trucks were driving longer routes and sometimes going back to a house if they missed it the first time. Since our drivers and field crews were out longer, there was a higher risk of injury.”  

Cutting the flock

A year after the city’s deployment of RubiconSmartCity, collection operations reported residential route times that were, on average, roughly an hour shorter.

Route mileage also has been nearly cut in half, going from an average of 63 miles to 33 miles per route. These reductions in route duration and mileage translated to more than $194,900 in annual savings. Additionally, the reduced mileage accounts for approximately 230,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions avoided, which is the equivalent of taking 20 passenger vehicles off the road each year.

Although the city was using telematics devices to monitor vehicle location, idling and diagnostic codes, it says they did not provide the necessary insights specific to solid waste collections, such as digitizing routes and providing route sequencing and service verification. In contracting with Rubicon, Harrisonburg’s goal was to increase route efficiency and digitize its paper-based processes for logging trips.

Rubicon worked with Harrisonburg to digitize and optimize driver routes by giving each driver a smartphone preloaded with an in-cab interface (ICI) to monitor vehicle location, route completion and service verifications in real time. The ICI also provides weight ticket logging and allows drivers to relay problems along their routes and, if needed, assist other drivers with unfinished routes. 

All information is sent to a secure portal for supervisors and dispatchers to evaluate. Drivers log out of their routes and return the ICIs to a charging station at the end of the day.  

“Utilizing the city’s vehicle breadcrumb trails, as well as input from the city, our customer success team manually created digital routes [which showed] every address that is serviced on those routes and uploaded it to Rubicon’s portal,” Rubicon Director of Customer Success Fred Hannon says. “In collaboration with the Harrisonburg team, Rubicon used the portal to create, label and digitize all 20 recurring residential routes. Digitization was the initial step toward a more efficient solid waste operation. Once routes were digitized, the focus then turned to the best way to run them.” 

By using RubiconSmartCity to digitize city refuse routes, Harrisonburg is saving up to 61 minutes of drive time for each route, going from an average of 351 minutes per route to 290 minutes per route.  

“Our drivers aren’t wasting time anymore because our overall processes are much more efficient, and we have better route visibility with the Rubicon solution on AWS,” Patel says. “The trucks have their own individual routes, and they all finish close to the same time. And drivers who finish earlier can go assist others in completing their routes.”  

Improving safety

Harrisonburg also is using RubiconSmartCity to monitor and report vehicle fault codes, which gives the city truck diagnostic data that wasn’t previously available. A telematics device plugs into the vehicle’s onboard diagnostic port and reads fault codes from the vehicle’s computer in real time. These fault codes then go to the portal, where Rubicon alerts managers and supervisors of critical issues. City staff can set alerts based on different threshold levels and also can set the alert frequency.  

Using this data, fleet administrators can identify vehicles with flagged pre- and post-inspection issues and implement preventive maintenance through custom reminders and notifications.  

“With the diagnostic data we’re receiving through the Rubicon solution, we can lower the risk of our vehicles breaking down on their routes,” Patel says. “We have more accurate reporting on our vehicles, and that helps us be proactive about maintenance for vehicles that can each cost over $165,000.” 

Rubicon says Harrisonburg also can ensure safer working conditions for its employees by conducting pre-trip vehicle inspections, which are required to log in to the Rubicon app, ensuring that each truck is safe before it goes out.   

“We are committed to worker safety, and RubiconSmartCity is helping us keep our employees safer by reducing route times, so they’re not working too much,” Patel says. “We’ve seen our workers’ compensation claims from sanitation employees cut in half, and that’s important to us. We want our longtime employees to feel better about retiring, knowing they’re not going to face a lot of injuries before that time.”  

Harrisonburg and Rubicon are working on a route optimization project to further reduce mileage, lower service time and balance workloads among drivers. However, details of the project have not been disclosed.

“We anticipate allocating our staff more efficiently and driving additional cost savings by continuing to optimize,” Patel says.