Keeping the Loads in Line

It’s certainly an issue for such operations as Perdido Landfill in Escambia County, FL, which serves 300,000 citizens in its collection of 250,000 tons of waste and recycling annually.

To help manage that waste, the county uses Carolina Software’s WasteWORKS-SQL. WasteWORKS is a PC-based ticketing, billing, and reporting software system.

The scalable software is designed for incoming and outgoing materials at the scale to ensure everything entering the solid waste facility is paid for and that an operation has all of the necessary information for financial, management, and governmental reporting.

“Every part of a transaction affects how much it costs to handle the material,” points out Jon Leeds, vice president of Carolina Software.

Time spent in a scale house operation leads one to conclude that efficiency is the key. Without a robust software system, the right traffic flow or enough staff, trucks sit in line, resulting in more fuel wasted and more hours for which drivers must be paid, he says.

The WasteWORKS software includes automation solutions for attended and unattended situations, as well as handheld devices for mobile transaction processing.

Carolina Software also has created the WasteWIZARD automation system, a weather-tight stainless-steel enclosure with an interface for the driver, similar to the ones used in the express lane at a toll plaza. After the vehicle is identified and the driver answers necessary questions, a record of the transaction is automatically produced. WasteWIZARD also is useful for after-hours processing.

For particularly busy times, such as on Saturdays, Carolina Software’s handheld device, the WasteWALKER, enables an employee to use the handheld device to walk through the line and record the incoming waste products.

Carolina Software also has an integrated rolloff management module, WasteWORKS for Containers, for renting and managing rolloffs. The company also provides lane-control systems, which work in conjunction with scales, and peripheral devices to control scale traffic.

“WasteWORKS software can basically be used anywhere material is being weighed in and weighed out at landfills, transfer stations, recycling facilities, rock quarries,” says Leeds. “It can produce just about any report somebody would need, including financial information, tonnage, government or any other custom reports.”

Denee M. Rudd, accounting supervisor for the Community and Environment Bureau of Escambia County’s Solid Waste Management in Cantonment, Florida, says WasteWORKS-SQL is favored there so more people-such as supervisors and managers-could access the program.

Many garbage truck vendors will use the automated scale. “They come in, plug in the code we give them, and the weight is then distinguished between their tare weight and their gross weight, and then it spits out a ticket for them,” says Rudd. “They won’t have to weigh back out, so they can get rid of their garbage and go out the back gate. It doesn’t bog down the traffic for the citizens of Escambia County.”

EnCORE, a software from Core Computing Solutions, is designed to handle every aspect of the solid waste and recycling industry in one integrated, Microsoft-certified application. The software is written in Microsoft.net, using a Microsoft SQL database, with Crystal Reports as the main report generator.

“Within EnCORE, there is the ability to manage both hauling operations,” points out Scott Fisher, sales director for Core Computing Solutions. “We are an NTEP-certified scale application, which reads directly from the scale indicators at the material recovery facility, landfill, transfer station, recycling center, or scrap yard.”

The software manages by location or by yard when the material comes in and gets sorted and re-graded and then also manages the transactions for the purchase or the sales order of the material for the processor. Additionally the software is designed for both attended and unattended touch screen applications.

Fisher points out that most solid waste operations now have a computerized program to manage their scale operations, so the existence of such technology on a solid waste management site is no longer the issue. What is now important is having the latest technology.

“It would be more like the latest in programming language,” says Fisher. “We’re written in Microsoft.net, which is the latest and most stable programming language that Microsoft offers. We also provide that in the cloud; this is very important.

“Companies and municipalities can either manage this on their own servers or choose to outsource that to us, where we host the software in a Tier 3 data center that’s 100% PCI-compliant and manage both the hardware and the software support. We use the software as a service over the Internet.” Fisher says 75% of his company’s customer base opts for the hosted solution.

Being able to track waste has becoming increasingly important in these times, Fisher points out.

In New York City, regulations require that trade waste be removed by a private carting company that must be licensed or registered through the Business Integrity Commission and do reporting.

Fisher says EnCORE’s software meets all of the stringent requirements for such transactions in New York City, including what material is coming through, what’s weighed, how it’s getting processed, and how it’s going out.

“Those reports automatically generate and go to New York’s trade waste commission,” he says. “We also have other reporting for LEED certification. Many of our customers have LEED-certified recycling operations for C&D and other operations where it’s keeping track of how many tons of material came in and how many tons of different types of material were diverted from the landfill.”

Automating vehicle weighing brings greater productivity and improved organization to a solid waste operation. In that vein, DataBridge is the latest software product portfolio to come from Mettler-Toledo.

“DataBridge products have been designed to meet the specific needs of customers ranging from the smallest one-scale operations to large organizations with weighing needs spread across multiple facilities,” notes Craig Nickoloff, vehicle scale product specialist for Mettler-Toledo.

DataBridge SS has been developed with a user-centered approach to help provide accurate and certified weights to be used in transactions, he says.

Training to use DataBridge SS is provided through short videos with step-by-step instructions through the weighing process with lesson plans to guide new employees through the tool.

Nickoloff says the DataBridge SS features are relevant to the way end-users currently do business. “The business environments in which our customers operate are constantly changing: new regulations, reduced manpower, changes in technology, information flow, security, etc.”

“Solid waste operations experience heavy traffic,” Nickoloff points out. “As such, productivity and efficiency across the scales are paramount. Furthermore, environmental regulations demand that operations have accurate records readily available for audits and timely reporting.”

“With hundreds of trucks going over scales every day, the most elementary of transactions can be error-prone even in the hands of the most experienced operators,” says Nickoloff. “Therefore, software needs to organize information in a meaningful way, both before and after a transaction. Providing access to this information in a simplified way ensures fewer errors and faster transactions.”

DataBridge SS automatically organizes orders, with reports generated using the weighing data. Users also can export transactions directly to their accounting systems.

“Our unattended systems can delegate transaction processing to the drivers by providing them step-by-step instructions that walk them through the different weighing scenarios they might face,” Nickoloff says “These systems in turn can be connected to systems that can capture these actions visually so that they can be pulled up during audits, security, and in other situations.”

Creative Microsystems offers the solid waste management industry everything from LoadMan scales to data management.

The company provides weigh-in-motion frontloader scales, as well as scales for rearloaders and rolloffs. The scales are designed for accuracy within 99% and have to be calibrated only once a year.

LoadMan weighs the loaded container going up and then reweighs the empty container coming down, providing the net content weight without stopping the forks. The software also informs the operator with customer and route information. The route can be managed and tracked from the back office.

The software operates with GPS position data and Google Mapping, enabling real-time tracking and playback of routes traveled by each truck. It provides remote tracking of routes, vehicle ID, driver ID, and customer accounts, as well as products hauled or delivered by account or job, load weights, load sites and commodity, truck and load locations by GPS coordinates, problems encountered, time and date stamp on all loads, custom reports, and communication with back-office platforms.

“We have the view of “˜let the drivers drive’,” says Alan Housley, director of operations for Creative Microsystems. “Their job is to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible and not be overloaded. The information really needs to be presented to the management in the back office.”

The company recently conducted a software trial with an end user who discovered after one day of viewing the data that they had a customer who was being undercharged by $6,000 a month, says Housley. The end user was able to use the software to provide simple reports, which are integrated into the software.

“They can examine customers and things that go out of bounds,” says Housley. “You can find drivers going out of bounds, drivers that might be sitting around too long for lunch. You can start measuring what they really want to get into: overloading or under loading.”

“They are able to measure diversion rates or the rates of what is going from waste to recycling,” says Housley. “We have all of the reporting mechanisms for them to be able to attain and study that.”

Geo-routing is one of two new components Creative Microsystems added to its software in the last year.

“The truck basically has a radar around it-you can look at it as a big circle around the truck,” Housley says. “As the truck is driving down the street, it will detect within whatever distances you input a list of customers and it will put to the top of the list the one that’s most likely to be picked up next. The driver doesn’t have to be working from the route sheet anymore.”

The asset management software tracks where every asset an end user manages is located and the history of its travel so that the rate can be charged to the correct customer.

Smith rite Disposal is a waste operation in Vancouver, British Columbia with 100 pieces of equipment on the road conducting residential and roll-off collection with its front-load trucks. The operation uses LoadMan scales and is looking to update its software for more compatibility in collecting data on the weight of each front-end can that is tipped.

“By getting the weights on each container, it tells us what our landfill costs are versus our revenue,” he points out.

Each route can have up to 100 calls. The driver has that route information in the truck on a screen that on each call offers information on the gross and tare weight of each bin tipped, with the net weight being the difference.

“It also accumulates that weight so we know how much payload we have on the truck,” says Caldwell, saying the information is conveyed back to the office on an ongoing basis. “At the end of the day, we collect all of that data and put it into our database.”

Soft-Pak’s Scale Management software is NTEP/CTEP certified and delivered via the cloud through a wired or wireless network connection. The software is designed for MRFs, transfer stations, scales and landfills to quickly and cost-effectively deploy and support multiple locations. Designed to interface to most any truck scale and indicator, typical end users are transfer stations, landfills, recycling centers, and MRFs.

Its features include integration with a third-party billing system, corporate-wide security with a single operational platform, centralized pricing, credit and taxation control, seamless integration with i-Pak or e-Pak (Soft-Pak’s core billing, routing, and customers management application), vehicle ID or license number search options, LEED reporting for sustainable green building reports; box or container ID (tare weights stored in advance), and flexible incoming/outgoing options. Other features include flexible material codes and ticket generations, security controls for each scale operator, unattended scale stations, flexible payment options at the scale house window, and detailed vehicle information direct from i-Pak or e-Pak.

The Scale Management product includes the ability to separate commingled material per vehicle, bill and track inbound/outbound loads by volume/yards or units, store vehicle, tare, and customer information, track inbound and outbound material inventory, and size/charge code direct from a work order. Custom scale tickets are optional with some customers choosing electronic signature pad’s to record drivers signature and picture.

Scale Management also offers the ability to provide a temporary scale ticket for onsite notification, tiered pricing, point of sale transactions, weights and invoicing using US standards or metric, inbound and outbound special waste tracking, variable reporting tools with reporting options, and interactive with i-Pak or e-Pak work orders, drivers’ logs, and route costing.

i-Pak is an integrated software solution that operates with an in-house server on Windows PCs and printers. In addition to scale and landfill ticketing, it features a customer service package, online dispatching with route management, integrated billing, accounts receivable, collections, route productivity and profitability, inventory tracking, sales management, and fleet maintenance, commodity tracking and hazardous waste handling, and management reporting.

Standard features include secure credit card authorization, zip code validation, letter generation, collection module, and Microsoft Excel, Word, Google Maps and Outlook integration. i-Pak solution is scalable.

e-Pak is a secure web-based solution that provides complete i-Pak functionality without the need for hardware and is used by operations that prefer not to support an in-house server.

e-Pak, which is platform and network independent, requires a standard high-speed Internet connection (DSL, cable, wireless or cellular). Companies use existing printers for invoicing and reporting. e-Pak can be licensed outright or paid for with a monthly fee based on the number of users. Customer support and software updates are provided.

“One of the advantages that our system has is the availability to build customers and keep historical information about different trucks and different customers,” notes Brian Porter, president of Soft-Pak.

“What’s most important is the availability to report what’s going on at the landfill or transfer station for either local or federal agencies, but also the availability to inventory if you’re doing any commodity tracking or if you’re looking to resell any of the commodities that are brought in, which is very common in the MRF arena.”

B-Tek Scales LLC offers a new line of indicators, including the BT2050, which combines a scale and a PC, notes Steve Myers, corporate systems engineer for the company.

These days, many operations are running 24/7, and software is designed to accommodate that. The self-service weighing terminal is unattended, but can have an attended option. Drivers enter such information on a 12.1-inch touch-screen display as where they are hauling to or from, what they are hauling and what company they represent.

The indicator comes with standard in-out software and is NTEP-approved. It can be programmed to specifications using Microsoft C# or VB.NET languages.

B-Tek also offers desktop models in the same family as the BT1050, in which operators can program and run any type of software they choose on it, Myers says.

“We have one customer who pays based on what comes in from certain municipalities,” says Myers. “That is entered at the scale so they can check it in real time. They don’t have to go back and re-enter at the office. The driver can pull onto the scale and say where he’s coming from, what his zip code is, what city or county. All of the information is collected automatically and at the end of the week, they can run reports on where everything came from, where it went out to, and what time it came in and went out.”

B-Tek provides software that can run on the new programmable indicators, including software that ties into the accounting system.

Creative Information Systems provides solutions for truck scale ticketing.

“That can be as simple as in putting in truck customer material, producing a ticket, having it stored in a database so that they can print a report or do an end-of-day cash report or maybe even bill,” notes Kevin St. John, executive vice president of Creative Information Systems.

“One of the biggest things in municipal solid waste is in making sure there’s an audit trail,” he adds. “People sometimes get greedy. Bills overwhelm people. So all of a sudden they think here’s some cash tickets, we can grab that cash and nobody will find out about it. Sooner or later, somebody finds out about it and somebody goes to jail. Most municipal governments don’t realize until it happens to them, and then all of a sudden within their department they have fraud happening.”

Typical end users include recycling centers or transfer stations trying to track what’s coming in, St. John says.

“Are they charging for a tire? Are they charging them for their C&D? It can be that simple,” he says.

“The whole concept nowadays is automating for effectiveness,” says St. John. “Some of the larger municipalities are putting in unattended kiosks, where drivers will use their license or swipe a pre-authorized card allowing them to remotely create a ticket, unassisted or assisted, just like they would be at a gas station where somebody is monitoring several pumps at once.

“Our software can take credit cards in an unattended situation. Maybe you’re dumping off your trash plus you have a refrigerator and you have to pay $5 for the refrigerator and maybe $100 for the trash-the software can happen in an unattended or remote attended situation like a gas station.

“All of our reports can be in Excel,” St. John says. “Maybe the administrator doesn’t have to have access to the ticketing software and they just need to see the data in an Excel pivot table so they can manipulate it the way they want. They don’t have to worry about exporting and importing it. It’s real time in a Microsoft SQL database.”

At one New England operation, the use of Creative Information Systems’ software increased throughput at the scale by 66%, St. John says.

“Now when somebody comes in and hits the scale, if they have a proximity card or identification card, they can swipe that and be in and out that fast,” he says. “A lot of municipalities now are trying to do more with less staff. They are trying to increase throughput on the scale because we are all in a fast-paced society. We don’t want to wait in line at the bank or the grocery store anymore. We want to go to the self-service aisle. That’s what’s happening in the transfer stations. In the world of municipal government, people want self-service. People want to go online and look at their reports and look at their history.”

Another approach solid waste operations are using is a “prepay” or “escrow” approach.

“Instead of somebody paying per charge at the scale house, they might put $200 into their account and as they go through the transfer station, it takes off whatever charge it is,” says St. John.

That approach substitutes for punch cards, whereby someone purchases a punch card in a pay-as-you-throw scenario.

In a remote attended situation, a municipality may have a few transfer stations and a landfill and with the software and video cameras, an employee at the main office can monitor the scales and produce a ticket for each one of those sites, St. John says.

Putting up a few kiosks with the scales and software can pay for itself in less than a year in savings in payroll costs, St John says.

Air-Weigh manufactures the LoadMaxx scale for refuse vehicles of all types: frontloaders, rearloaders, sideloaders, and rolloffs.

“It provides the driver with instant weigh information for the suspensions, the steer, and the drive, plus they get the GPW and the net weight,” points out Michael Ferguson, national refuse account manager for Air-Weigh. “It allows them to make sure they’re legal and not overloading the trucks because there are safety and maintenance issues there.”

BinMaxx is the newest product Air-Weigh has released to the market. It is designed for front-load vehicles.

“A lot of our customers were unhappy with what they had to do up until this point with front-load scales for weighing individual containers,” Ferguson says. “The systems that were on the market before were very expensive and difficult to keep calibrated, so at our customers’ request, we developed a new technology that we use on the LoadMaxx.”

BinMaxx is mounted on the arms of a frontloader to accurately weigh containers in a more cost-efficient manner, he says.

The driver lifts the container, empties it, and returns it to the ground. The display shows the current life number, net weight of the container and accumulated net weight of all containers emptied to that point.

The lift number and weight information is automatically incremented without driver intervention upon the next lift. The driver can document the lift with a weight receipt. Bin weight information also can be transmitted to an onboard computer or route management system for data collection and analysis.

“One of the things that is important to us is that forward-thinking, f