Watching the Weight, Saving on Expense

Scales combined with data management have become a critical approach to ensuring accurate billing and keeping costs under control.

The ability to fully load trucks without overloading them is crucial for transfer operations. To a lesser extent, the same holds true for waste collection. “As any landfill manager will tell you, it is all about the tonnage and the dollars, and the more accurate the data, the more accurate and profitable an operation can be,” says Jon Leeds, vice president of Carolina Software.

“From budgeting to planning to accurate receivables, accurate data starts with the scales and is the foundation for any solid waste management operation,” he adds.

Leeds points out that while it is still fairly common to see volume in terms of cubic yards used in lieu of scales—especially with yard debris and C&D facilities—“accuracy is minimal and the law of averages is really the only hope for useful data. “The upfront investment for scales and associated facilities—the scale house—keeps many small sites out of the scale business,” Leeds says. “A nice set of truck scales isn’t really worth the investment without a powerful data collection and management system to handle operations.”

WasteWORKS software turns scale data into reportable and billable transactions, Leeds says. “As I often joke, the trash becomes data.”

Although the use of stored tare weights diminishes the accuracy of an individual transaction, Leeds says, it allows facilities to operate more efficiently with one stop on the scales and can be made more accurate with regular re-tares and by requiring certain types of vehicles, such as roll-off trucks, to weigh in and out for each trip. “Software systems like WasteWORKS can handle stored tare weights for vehicles and individual rolloff containers, but this requires a fairly involved process of collecting and storing container weights from what is in many situations a very large population of containers,” Leeds says. “Typically, facilities will either rely on generic stored tare weights for containers or they will simply require each rolloff vehicle to weigh in and out.”

Accurate weights are the key to accurate billing and a solid customer service system, Leeds points out. “Customers know scales are responsible for an accurate monthly bill and that they will only be billed for exactly what their vehicles delivered,” he says. “Haulers or those running collections operations can also make use of this information for planning and management.

“Perhaps they see that a particular truck is only half full at each visit and this prompts them to extend a route or eliminate one. The more accurate the data, the better their planning will be.”

Leeds says landfill and transfer station managers can make better and more accurate decisions about staffing, equipment, and planning with precise information from the scales and the data-management system. “You can think of the scales and software or data-management system as an integrated, strategic planning tool for solid waste facilities,” he says. “Transfer operations depend on the scales and data-management systems to not only provide details about overall volume of inbound and outbound materials, but also to ensure that each transfer truck is filled appropriately.

“Although many transfer stations are equipped with scales to ensure that all transfer trucks are neither underfilled or overfilled—trucks are parked on a scale while they are being filled—a software system like WasteWORKS provides additional tools for tracking the fill level of each transfer truck and can provide warnings when certain thresholds are nearing.”

Black Hawk County Solid Waste in Waterloo, IA, uses WasteWORKS in its multicounty operation. The operation also has added WasteWizard, which automatically does the job of a weigh master through the use of magnetic stripe cards, radio frequency interface device (RFID) tabs, or a keypad device.

“The WasteWizard keypad has cameras. We have two for right hand and left hand steer vehicles, so each load has four pictures for security,” says Brett Vette, the administrator of the solid waste commission for Black Hawk County Solid Waste.

WasteWORKS is used primarily for accurate billing, with the scales used to determine fees. “I’m really happy with what it’s done for the speed and accuracy with which trucks move in and out,” says Vette.

For Unattended Operations
A San Francisco Bay Area transfer station reports a similar situation. According to John Oranje, vice president of facilities for Marin Sanitation at San Rafael, CA, the station wanted to incorporate automated, unattended weight processing of its collection trucks, since each truck brought in multiple commodities and needed individual weights on each commodity as well as overall vehicle weights. Additionally, because the station was using its existing accounting system to operate the facility, the scale system needed to interface with that accounting system.

The system it chose was the Low Profile Above Ground scale made by Unitec Corp. in Seattle, WA. Marin Sanitation already used Unitec’s Low Profile Axle Scales in the trailer bays of its transfer station, so it went with the Unitec/ILS Scale Q scale management software package because of its ability to handle unattended weight transactions, while accommodating individual product weights on each truck, and interfacing the scale transactions with its existing accounting system.

In Little Rock, AR, Interface Logic Systems’ ScaleQ has been used to streamline operations and protect the city and operators from fraud in its municipal landfill.

“We don’t use cubic yards—we weigh everything,” says Warren Atkins, solid waste services manager. “With their software, we track all of our customers, what kind of materials coming in, and where it’s going in the landfill.

“If they’re set up for charge accounts, the scales are capturing all of the weights. Each customer’s assigned a number, so it’s tracking that month’s charges. Invoices are generated for each one of them. We mail that out each month. If you are cash or a credit card customer, it prints your ticket and you pay on the outbound side.”

“The truck scale really serves in a lot of applications as the cash register,” says Jim Gottliebson, marketing manager and president of Interface Logic Systems. “This is where you determine whether you’re getting paid properly for the amount of material you’re bringing in or shipping out.

Photo: Interface Logic Systems At Little Rock, AR’s scale plaza, inbound and outbound truck scales flank a freestanding scale office, allowing operators to process transactions on either side.

“A reliable system that is going to capture the weight accurately is critical to know what you’re doing,” he adds. “In addition, on the regulatory side for solid waste management, most landfill and transfer stations also have the obligation for a maximum daily allowance, and if you exceed that the fines are significant, which can be very costly as well as conceivably costing you your permit to operate.”

Little Rock had been looking for secure and independent cash register drawers to protect the city and operators from fraud.

ScaleQ provides a cash drawer interface with three separate drawers, giving each operator an individual till. Completed cash transactions verify the attendant of record and open the drawer assigned to the attendant, enabling security and accountability.

Little Rock’s scale plaza has an inbound and outbound truck scale on either side of a freestanding scale office, allowing operators to process transactions from either scale. The scale house supervisor does database maintenance, designs and prints reports, and processes manual tickets from the office PC. All PCs in the scale house are on a local area network and share a common database.

Getting the data to the main office for billing in a manner that is quick, efficient, and accurate is equally critical, Gottliebson says.

“You don’t want to manually transcribe several hundred tickets every single day,” he says. “You’ve got so many on payroll and it’s going to take three to four hours to manually transcribe all those documents. First of all, it takes a tremendous amount of labor, and secondly, no matter how good your people are, when you’re transcribing that much information manually into a system the potential for error grows significantly.”

Little Rock also uses radio frequency vehicle identification, unattended weighing and automated traffic light control, allowing municipal trucks to be processed before and after normal scale house hours of operation.

The vehicles are equipped with radio frequency transponders or tags, which are read by RF tag readers mounted near each scale. Each tag corresponds with a truck record in the ScaleQ database, which retrieves the necessary data to process the transaction, capture truck weight, post the data to the transaction file, and print a ticket without the need for a scale attendant.

RFID tags allow the city to operate extended hours without additional or overtime labor as well as spreading out the traffic burden.

“All of the tare weights are captured as the trucks come in,” says Atkins. “They only have to go in through the inbound. Since we already have the tare weights, there’s no stopping at the outbound.

“It takes probably half the time to come in, dump, and go out with the tags than if you had to sit on the outbound scales, get your weight, get your weight tickets, and all of that done.”

The radio tags also are tied to the fuel system. Little Rock has its own onsite fuel stations.

With rising fuel costs, if vehicles in transfer operations are not being utilized to their maximum, “you’re going to lose a lot of money just in transporting airspace, and that’s not practical,” says Gottliebson. “Additionally, the more loads you have to take in addition to that cost you’re going to spend in fuel and time is just not getting material out of the transfer station to the destination efficiently.”

Michael Ferguson is the national account manager for Air-Weigh, which manufactures onboard scale equipment for the refuse industry, among others. The scales can be installed in refuse trucks that have air-ride suspension, mechanical walking-beam suspensions or camelback suspensions.

The scales provide information on steer axle weight, the drive axle weight, the gross vehicle weight (GVW) and the net payload weight on a digital in-cab display.

“The difference between us and other products is that not only do we provide the net payload and GVW, but we also give the drivers axle group weight—the steer and the drive,” notes Ferguson.

Systems to Fit the Need
According to Vernon Helbig, superintendent of maintenance for the city of Long Beach, while payload improvement is always important, the primary factors behind the city’s adoption of a system made by Vulcan On-Board Scales in Kent, WA, is refuse fleet was a desire to eliminate overloading by shifting the responsibility to the drivers. “We’ve had scales on our trucks for years, “Helbig says. “We’re in the process of switching our fleet to Vulcans, and our experience with them is very good.

“Our purpose is to make the drivers look at the weight of their vehicles so they won’t be looking at overweight tickets,” Helbig goes on to explain. “But also it helps reduce overweight maintenance problems.”

Vulcan makes a full range of scales, from the basic type used by Long Beach to the very exacting scales employed by City Waste (Waste Management) at Houston, TX, where precise weighing is important to the billing.

Photo: Interface Logic Systems The scale house supervisor does database maintenance, designs and prints reports, and processes manual tickets from the office PC.

Air-Weigh scales are designed for route efficiency. “They can go to the landfill when they reach their maximum legal load, avoiding overweights, fines, penalties in the landfills and by agencies, and, most importantly, it allows them to operate a more safe vehicle so they’re not driving down the road or city streets overweight,” says Ferguson.

The system also has interfaces through SAE J1708, J1939 and RS232 for integration for onboard computers of data management.

“They can interface our system to an onboard computer and send that information back to a home office, store it in a computer or whatever they choose to do with our information,” says Ferguson.

Although the scales aren’t designed for billing, the system helps to ensure accurate billing, says Ferguson. “They are used for auditing purposes, so when they are billing customers they have an idea they are doing it correctly,” he says. “For example, on the front loaders that people put our scales on, they’ll use them to audit containers and get it within accuracy of 2%.

“They‘ll know how much weight is in the containers they pick up, they’ll know who’s overloading and who’s underloading their containers and then the next time they do a contract with that company, they’ll use that information for setting that rate. They’ll use the scales for cost control and setting rates.”

Refuse truck drivers don’t want to come off of a route early because they are underloaded, Ferguson says. “They’re not efficient and they’re not getting the best use of the vehicle,” he adds. “They might have to take another trip out to finish their route, which is definitely not cost-efficient.

“Second, they don’t want to overload those trucks because there’s a whole slew of problems with that. Trucks can be pulled over to a landfill and made to stop there. There are penalties associated with that and all of that is going to cost the company money.”

The important issue is safety, Ferguson points out. “The last thing you need is a garbage truck driving down a city street overloaded and it gets into an accident. That becomes a whole big issue with liability,” he says.

Paul Koch is the fleet manager for the city of Durham, NC. The city put Air-Weigh scales on its trucks for two reasons: to combat maintenance issues centering on breaking springs in trucks and to comply with law enforcement.

North Carolina had switched enforcement of road weight restrictions from its Department of Motor Vehicles to the state police. “They used to leave municipalities alone, but not anymore,” says Koch. “We had to get on the right side of the curve. At the same time, we had trucks we knew were overweight because we pay for an eight-hour day, but if they can finish their route in four, they get paid for eight. They were definitely running those trucks overloaded, because you could see them coming in with the springs broken.”

The scales now help the operators understand they need to be paying attention to weight, Koch says.

Stephen Cole, OEM account manager for Cardinal Scale, agrees that a scale functions as a cash register for transfer stations or landfills.

“Everything that’s going to go through there is going to be filled out in a dollar format, so it is a cash register,” Cole points out. “The accuracy of it is very important and the consistency of generating consistent information in a timely fashion is the key to having a good scale system.”

Cardinal Scale builds static truck scales. “With fuel costs and vehicle maintenance, you want to maximize the loads,” says Cole. “You don’t want to send out a half-loaded truck, because it’s costing you the same amount of money as if it was fully loaded. With $4-per-gallon fuel on the horizon, people are going to be even more conscious of this. The use of scales in loading a transfer truck is very important for those factors.”

Cole says the same holds true for a company with a packer truck or a residential waste pickup truck with a compactor on it.

Using route management software, a truck driver who is cognizant of his truck weight may be able to extend his route to take in another portion of another route without having to go to the transfer station.

“That’s going to save miles, wear and tear, speed up the operation, and maximize the use of the truck by having it fully loaded when he goes to the transfer station rather than half-loaded and running back out to the same neighborhood or close to it to run a second round,” Cole adds.

For those who manage the transfer station—if they are charging for its use—the accuracy of the scale and the speed with which they can get a truck across the scale are important, says Cole.

“Time is money, and they don’t want to have long lines of trucks coming into the transfer station,” he says, adding that’s especially critical during peak hours.

“Sometimes two scales are necessary, even though you really only need the two scales when you have these high peak times so your flow of traffic and discharge inside of the transfer station is smoother and more organized as far as being able to get in, unload, and get back to the outbound scale while the trucks are coming in.”

In some cases, there can be two scales in and one scale out, Cole says, adding that landfills have the same scenario. “You may have trucks isolated to this particular cell and you can’t have a lot of congestion there, so you’ve got to move the trucks in and out very quickly so they can offload and get out of the area so other trucks can be in there.”

At L.B. Recycling in Covington, GA, the truck traffic had been in a constant state of bottlenecking until September 2008, when the company installed two scales from Rice Lake Weighing Systems side by side for inbound and outbound use. Time is money and operators found that by installing the scales, it eased the problem.

“Vehicle scales measure inventory and determine revenue,” says Bill Murphy, Rice Lake Weighing Systems heavy capacity sales director. “Determining an accurate cost and weight of materials on inbound shipments begins with the accurate weighing of that material as it enters a facility. An accurate measure of finished goods on outbound shipments is also critical in calculating the eventual profit for that company.”

Accurate data collection and monitoring of inventories starts with a certifiable vehicle scale, says Murphy.

“Subtitle D regulation in the early 1990s required an accurate accounting of waste entering landfills so that disposal of that material could be monitored and longevity of landfills could be projected,” he says. “The weighing of vehicles has proved to be a more accurate means of measuring material brought to a landfill than previous methods, such as estimating volume. Subtitle D mandated a reduction of material brought to landfills through recycling and other means therefore prolonging the life span of landfills and reducing operating costs.”

Murphy points out that it’s important to note that as fuel and labor costs escalate, vehicles must be loaded to maximum capabilities without overloading trucks and incurring fines or delays in delivery of the material.

“Trucks must be loaded to ensure compliance with local, state, and federal weight regulations not only for GVW but also axle weights on vehicles,” he says. “Overloaded trucks damage highways and bridges, costing our government millions of dollars in annual repairs. Underloaded vehicles significantly increase the operating costs of transfer stations.”

Systems such as the LoadMan Onboard Fork Weighing System by Creative Microsystems enables operations to create a seamless data system and to audit accounts, says Richard Boyovich, director of marketing and sales for Creative Microsystems.

The company’s largest customer in the United States is Republic Services. “They’ve purchased close to 150 systems for front loaders and use them primarily as auditing systems,” says Boyovich. “It’s basically not a weight-based billing system, but they move the trucks from one location to another quite often, and they’ll audit customers within routes.”

The audits help the company determine its return on the investment for any particular company, he%2