Like an assembly line in a factory, the inbound wastestream defines the workload, the pace—even the personality of a landfill. And as our industry works to maintain economic balance in a time of falling tonnage and revenue, the ability to manage that wastestream has never been more important.
Toward that goal, companies that provide truck scales, onboard scales, and the associated software are also providing our industry with a valuable measurement tool—or, perhaps we should say, management tool. For after all, when we get down to it, we can’t manage what we don’t measure.
Modern weighing systems may be bringing new technology, but the concepts of practicality and ingenuity are certainly not new. Take for example, a company that’s been around for over half a century—Rice Lake Weighing Systems. It not only produces the Survivor series of truck scales—described as “the toughest scales on earth”—but it also manufactures portable truck scales and onboard scales for straight trucks, tractor-trailers, and wheel loaders. And all of Rice Lake’s scales are integrated into high-tech electronics because the company knows that accurately measuring the weight is only the first step in the process of managing a waste facility.
Some companies also bring to the table a broad range of expertise—often going beyond scales—to bring waste facilities more of what can be referred to as value added. PC Scale Tower is a company well known for providing robust scale management software. But its experience in the waste industry goes much deeper. PC Scale Tower also offers collection route management software for waste vehicles. In today’s world of multitasking and specialty apps, it’s good to know that the providers you’re working with really know something about the waste industry.
Might sound kind of boring, huh, weighing trash on the way to the landfill? But it’s a critical first step toward accomplishing many other tasks—tasks that fall within the four main categories of money, tonnage, operations, and compliance.
The Money
Your scale and software system should be able to convert tonnage information into dollars and cents quickly and accurately. So, whether it’s inbound waste or outbound recyclables, you need to manage that tonnage effortlessly, in many cases automatically.
Time is money, not only for you but for your customers as well, and they will appreciate the effort you put into streamlining their landfill experience. And no place is this effort more apparent than at the scale facility. Imagine a route truck pulling onto the scale, punching in a secret code…then, blip…out comes a receipt. In a matter of seconds, the load is weighed, photographed and recorded. The transaction and invoice have been sent downtown, and the truck is on its way.
Another option is to add Wi-Fi capabilities to your scale. This allows you to integrate the use of a handheld device with your scale system. In the right application, these can help eliminate vehicle stacking and reduce customer wait time.
Sure, it’s possible, and many landfills now utilize such automated systems for their commercial customers. The first step toward increased efficiency is streamlining what you do and how you do it.
According to Jon Leeds, vice president of Carolina Software (WasteWorks), that company’s WasteWIZARD system can be used on the express lane, unmanned and/or after hours. The strength of this unit—and others like it—comes from its ability to coordinate with many other input/output devices, including radio frequency identification (RFID), driver input keypad, barcode scanning, proximity readers, and controls for red/green light and gate controls. These driver-assisted terminals can also be linked to your digital cameras, ticket printers, and even to an intercom.
But don’t worry—this may sound complicated, but like a great chef these savvy manufacturers will handle the ingredients. All you have to do is look over the menu and decide what looks good.
As you might imagine, there is a continual effort by software creators toward making scale software more user friendly, because the ability to track lots of data is irrelevant if it can’t be easily retrieved and used productively. Useful output options include a wide variety of charts, tables, customizable reports, and, perhaps most important, the ability to interface or export to various accounting formats.
Some landfills—especially large landfills or those that are part of a network of many facilities—use fairly sophisticated accounting programs. Thus, the ability to translate raw scale data into the necessary format is vital. No problem—most scale software systems can be customized to match whatever accounting system you’re using. Remember, the folks that created those scale programs are…programmers.
But what about those small, individual landfills that don’t have, or even want, an elaborate accounting system—or who might be put off by the thought of learning and using a customized program? Again, it’s no problem, because we’re dealing with manufacturers who know that your primary goal is to run the scales efficiently…period.
For example, SMSTurbo, a scale software system produced by Creative Information Systems, offers the best of both worlds. According to Victor Parrish, vice president of sales, SMSTurbo is “preset to export to a wide range of accounting programs, such as QuickBooks, Peachtree, Timberline Office, and SAP. And many of our clients,” he states, “use more than one.” Some of the company’s clients transfer scale data directly to QuickBooks to create invoices for individual customers. But those same landfills may also need to export other transaction data to larger customers in another format—say to their general ledgers.
When asked about SMSTurbo’s flexibility to output to a broad array of formats, Victor quickly affirmed, “That is the goal.”
| Photo: Carolina Software The WasteWalker handheld device |
Tonnage
Bottom line: Landfills use scales to track inbound and outbound tonnage. Tonnage data is necessary for billing, regulatory and financial reporting, for calculating tax or user fees and for a myriad of operational benchmarks, including airspace consumption. And in that regard, scale systems must be accurate and reliable.
Scale accuracy has of course been—and continues to be—foundational, and certainly modern scale systems are accurate. But the real benefits of modern scales and software are delivered in the form of increased productivity. And although we’re talking primarily about landfill scales, keep in mind: The same principles apply to transfer stations, recycling facilities, and, in the case of onboard scales, on individual trucks or wheel-loaders.
Consider this scenario: A large wheel-loader is used to topload a live-floor trailer at a small transfer station. Once loaded, the transfer truck leaves the loading pit and stops at the truck scale just prior to making the trip to the landfill. The weight shows the truck is 5,300 pounds below its maximum weight. This creates a quandary: Do you send it back to the pit for more trash, or save time and just send it on to the landfill? At this point, either option will increase your operating cost.
An even tougher question arises if the truck is overloaded. Sending it out could result in costly fines and increased liability, but sending it back to unload some waste can be difficult…and may require multiple trips across the scale to get it right.
An obvious solution is to install pit scales so that individual axle weights and the total weight are known before the truck reaches the main scale. This is usually a viable solution, but for some smaller facilities—or for those in transition—the cost of installing dedicated pit scales may be prohibitive or just too difficult. Jack Ewing of SI Onboard has an alternative. “In the right application, miniature axle scales can work very well,” he notes, “and, when mounted aboveground, make for easier cleaning.”
Another possible solution is simply to install onboard scales on the truck itself. This too would allow it to be loaded to the appropriate weight the first time, every time.
As a final option, the wheel-loader that’s loading the truck could also be equipped with an onboard scale. Measuring and summing each bucket load can help ensure an accurate pre-estimate of the truck’s payload. Onboard scales have been used on wheel-loaders in the mining and aggregate industry for many years.
And, while neither of these onboard options can provide certified weights, and thus cannot replace your main deck scale, either can provide the accuracy necessary to optimize your payload, often to within 1%.
Onboard truck scales can also be used on route trucks to track the weight generated by individual customers or stops. According to Ewing, “Onboard scales are commonly put on packer bodies to help companies or municipalities audit their accounts for maximum efficiency.” This type of information can help you more fairly match customer billing to customer generation rates. It can also provide information useful for streamlining other parts of your operation.
He also sees onboard scales, along with other types of sensors, used on transfer trucks to monitor driver performance.
In rural areas, where regional landfills are often combined with several satellite container sites, there is an increasing push to cut costs while maintaining a good level of service. That can mean closing some of those sites. But the question is, which ones?
We’ve worked on several of these types of projects, and the solution, aside from social and political issues, is always dependent on knowing how many tons are received at each site. With accurate tonnage information, it’s relatively easy to run a few scenarios and then identify which ones make economic sense …and which don’t. The problem is, of course, these small facilities don’t have scales—and because the trash from multiple sites is often combined into a single truckload, coming up with tonnage figures for each site is impossible. Impossible, that is, unless the truck has onboard scales. With onboard scales, the driver can record individual tonnage records regardless of how many service stops the truck makes.
| Figure 1. |
Operational Issues
Along another economic track, your scale system can provide an in-depth look at your landfill’s hourly workload during each day of the week. This type of information can often identify opportunities to reduce operating hours…or even eliminate certain days when tonnage levels can’t justify opening the front gate.
Figure 1, which shows average tons per hour for every day of the week, identifies an opportunity to reduce both operating hours and operating days.
Tonnage patterns like these, which start low, peak in the middle of the day and then drop off the last few hours, are good candidates to be condensed into a shorter workday.
This facility, currently receiving trash from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. might be able to open at 8 a.m. and close at 3 p.m., with relatively little impact to the inbound tonnage.
It also shows that being open on Sunday, with an average of only 37 tons per day, is probably not very efficient. Here again, closing Sunday would tend to shift most of those 37 tons to Saturday.
Of course, these kinds of decisions must also be weighed against social, political, and other factors. But without looking at your landfill’s hourly and daily tonnage, you won’t know what’s possible.
Similarly, the productivity and cost of your landfill’s frontline activities are nearly all related to the inbound tonnage rate: basic information provided by your scale system. The data is there, it’s just a matter of extracting it in a useful format.
One simple but revealing benchmark is tons of waste per machine hour. By dividing daily tonnage by daily machine hours, you can quickly generate a chart like Figure 2. When properly applied to the frontline operations of pushing and compacting waste, as in this example, such data can show how well your operation performs each day.
Every process has a sweet spot, where the cost of production is balanced with output, resulting in maximum efficiency and lowest cost.
For this scenario, let’s assume that this optimum point occurs at 60 tons per hour for the compactor…and 190 tons per hour with the dozer.
Figure 2 shows considerable day-to-day variation from those optimum levels, which, in the world of production, equates to lower efficiency and higher cost.
So, how do you get from the tonnage data in your scale system to this type of chart? It’s not as difficult as you might think. Most scale programs can output transaction data into various spreadsheet formats—Microsoft’s EXCEL is perhaps the most common. Once you’ve exported daily tonnage information to a spreadsheet, combine it with daily equipment hours, which can be pulled from daily fuel logs, service records, or time sheets.
Then simply divide each day’s tonnage by the hours logged by individual machines and chart the results. Presto: daily production rates for your landfill. With a bit more work, you can actually relate equipment hours to cost…and end up with a daily or weekly operations performance budget. The point is that it all starts with the basic data your scale system is already tracking.
Regulatory Compliance
An ever-increasing number of regulatory compliance reports and thresholds are based on your inbound tonnage, and the need to track and report that tonnage in varying formats is a fact of life for most landfills.
Most states now require some form of annual reporting in regard to total tons of waste disposed, and many also require similar tonnage reports for materials diverted from the wastestream and recycled or put to some other beneficial use, such as alternative daily cover (ADC). Tracking the various types of information that must accompany different materials can be difficult, not from the standpoint of software capabilities, but more in regard to minimizing user confusion. For example, at some landfills, inbound waste records must include the following information: tons, date and time, origin of waste, type of waste, type of recyclable, and customer or account number.
This sounds simple, but in some cases we’ve seen landfills tracking more than 40 categories of waste, including things like C&D mixed, C&D wood, C&D sheetrock, C&D metal, C&D rubble…well, you get the idea. And, while there are plenty of benefits to having detailed information regarding your wastestream, such detail can cause lots of confusion when your regular scale operator is on vacation and someone else has to fill in. One solution here is to have a library of photos—in the computer, in a binder, or posted on the wall—showing examples of various types of loads and their correct classification. When in doubt, the scale operator can match the load to the photo.
These are the types of problems that your scale software provider needs to hear about. More often than not, they can help you come up with solutions.
Here’s another twist on that same type of issue: Having lots of waste classifications also provides an opportunity for some customers to, well…um…let’s just say it: Some customers will lie about the type of material they have in their trucks in order to get a lower per-ton rate.
Seeing is believing. So in order to help scale operators believe the customer’s description, they need to see what’s in the load. To accomplish this, many scale systems are moving beyond mirrors on a pole and are now integrating overhead cameras into their operations. Cameras that can pan, zoom, and tilt…and, yes, these photos can be integrated into the transaction.
| Figure 2. |
Finding the Right System
OK, while it’s all good and well to have all of these side benefits available from a scale/software system, the real bottom line is having a scale system that provides fast, accurate weights day in and day out.
We get to speak with scores of landfill managers every year as part of our job conducting operational efficiency studies, and we’re always alert for systems that are working well. One indicator of a great scale system is when we ask the manager, “What kind of scale and software programmer you running?” and the response is, “Gee, I’m not sure; we never think about it.”
The right scale system—you know you have it when you just don’t have to think about it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the system was selected haphazardly. Nor does it mean that updates and maintenance are ignored. Instead, like an outstanding employee, it simply means that when there’s a job to be done, it’s done right the first time, and you don’t have to give it a second thought.
Again, if you are planning to upgrade your existing system, or installing your first, take time to learn about the various options available so you can select one that best fits your needs. One of those needs might be the ability to generate split tickets.
According to Scott Fisher, business development manager with Encore Financial & Operational Software, the ability to split tickets is just one of many important attributes to look for in a scale software program.
An increasing number of landfills are importing/exporting mixed loads—mixed in the sense of various types of commodities or multiple vendors/customers. For example, an inbound load of recyclables may include baled cardboard and office paper. Using a scale system with the ability to split tickets, the truck can be weighed, one type of commodity can be off-loaded and then the truck can be reweighed. When completed, the net weights can be assigned to the correct commodity or account.
“Also,” Scott explains, “Flexibility is important.” His clients appreciate the ability to custom-create a system meeting their specific needs. With the ability to include GPS-logged route information with automated scale systems, the landfill scales are now able to provide not only landfill reports, but also help optimize the collection side of the operation as well.
Consider, for example, the benefits of linking individual route truck performance such as stop/start time for each account on the route with GPS, onboard scales (to record each customer’s weight), and overall drive time/distance. This detailed information can be linked with the landfill’s scale through an automated system using RFID or a touchscreen. Finally, all of this information can then be accessed remotely from any other computer.
OK, in order to provide consistent, accurate weights you obviously need to select a dependable, high-quality scale/software system—that’s a no-brainer. But before you run out and purchase the slickest, quickest system you can find, take time to figure out what you want your system to actually do. In some cases that may also include figuring out the problems you want your scale system to solve.
If yours is a small landfill, one conducting few recycling activities and processing only a handful of cash and charge accounts, you might select a scale system that simply weighs vehicles, calculates the rate, and prints out a three-part receipt: one for the customer, one for the scale-house file, and an original that’s sent to accounts payable.
If your needs are simple, then the system can be, too. But like Andy of Mayberry, such hometown simplicity is becoming far less common at today’s multitasking landfill.
It’s more likely that you’ll select a robust system that is able to manage many different customer accounts that must be tracked by origin, waste type, commodity, and charge-out rates, while providing a broad menu of reports, billing, and interface capabilities. Here’s a quick look at what these powerful, modern systems can provide.
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