Success Story:
Parks & Sons
Saves $150,000 in fuel costs after implementing GPS Insight
Company:
Parks & Sons
Industry:
Waste Management
Location:
Sun City, AZ
Website:
parksandsons.com
“Fuel is our company’s fourth highest expense – so any marginal change in that cost significantly affects our bottom line.“
Shawn Parks
Business Manager, Parks & Sons
Highlights
GPS Insight has the flexibility to integrate with nearly any other software platform
Route efficiencies thanks to GPS Insight provided tremendous fuel savings—$150,000 in the first year alone
Improve productivity by reducing the amount of time relaying key location data between drivers and dispatchers
Company
Parks & Sons is a family-owned and locally-operated waste and recycling hauler in Sun City, Arizona.
Challenge
Over the past 10 years, Parks & Sons has experienced substantial growth, significantly expanding their footprint across the Phoenix area. Prior to tracking their fleet with GPS technology, the dispatchers and area supervisors were relying heavily on CB radio and cellular devices to communicate the physical location and destination of their drivers across 50 to 65 varying routes. This invariably led to an unnecessary level of calls throughout the day relaying simple, yet vital, location information. “We had to rely on this voice communication to understand the location of our trucks in order to dispatch new orders throughout the day,” said Shawn Parks, Business Manager at Parks & Sons.
With their expansion came added complexity. As new stops were added to routes, assigning them was a manual process; one that did not account for inefficient route overlaps.
Inefficiencies add unnecessary cost to any organization. Not only do route overlaps extend the amount of time it takes to complete area pickups, it extends the usage of the vehicle and the fuel it takes to operate the vehicle. As a recycling hauler, Parks & Sons is proud of their environmental efforts and any unnecessary fuel or vehicle usage detracts from their goal to serve their community.
Aside from understanding where in each route a vehicle is located, Parks & Sons wanted to gain deeper insight into servicing their fleet. The wear and tear on each vehicle is of great concern to any fleet stakeholder and in order to operate at full efficiency, vehicles have to be on the road. Parks & Sons needed a better system to understand which vehicles needed servicing and a better way to get them back on the road as quickly as possible.
Solutions
Parks & Sons was unique in that they saw the value a GPS vehicle tracking solution would provide from an early stage. Years before working with GPS Insight, Parks & Sons had implemented GPS tracking from two different providers before realizing that neither of them could provide the service or functionality that GPS Insight could offer. “We wanted a solution that provided powerful tools and features, but with a simple interface. Prior to GPS Insight, we had never experienced a solution that could provide both,” said Shawn Parks.
Benefits
With GPS Insight, dispatchers at Parks & Sons could get an easy to use birds-eye view of where their trucks were at any given point. No longer would they need to rely on phone calls or CB radio communications to relay a driver’s current location or destination. This significantly reduced the dispatchers’ time spent on these tasks and allowed them to focus on revenue generating tasks like, taking more orders or expanding service to customers.
Route inefficiencies were also addressed through the GPS Insight route replay feature. Dispatchers were able to see the routes for multiple vehicles at one time. Shawn Parks states it best, “We were able to identify route overlapping with ease – it’s all there on a single screen for us to see. Making our routes more efficient has never been easier for us.” By correcting these route inefficiencies and improving overall vehicle usage, Parks & Sons has seen a fuel savings of $150,000 in the first year alone, far surpassing their initial return on investment.
Through the implementation of GPS Insight vehicle tracking and the use of new, more fuel efficient trucks, Parks & Sons is addressing this tremendous expense head on.
Fleet maintenance provided Parks & Sons with a very unique challenge and opportunity. The organization developed a custom built application specifically for vehicle maintenance. With flexibility of GPS Insight to integrate valuable data across nearly any platform, integrating with the custom built Parks & Sons application was a very intuitive process. Shawn Parks was elated to know, “The data was ours to access and do with it what we want. That is very important to us, as the more information we can exchange between our different software platforms, the more informed we are to make better decisions.” Dispatch and management now have full insight into the health of their fleet, knowing at all times where in the field their vehicles are located and knowing which vehicles are currently able to provide service.
