March/April 2005

You might think there would be little reason for a local authority to track street cleansing vehicles, since it would know where they were already. Not true: Sandwell Council for one says it has achieved "dramatic improvements" since installing a satellite tracking system in its cleansing fleet.

The point is that the vehicles don't necessarily follow predetermined routes; they also have to respond to "special service requests". This is where the tracking comes in: it allows the control centre to identify the nearest vehicle to a service request point, and re-route it accordingly.

The council says that tracking the vehicles has enabled it to improve response time by at least 100 per cent. It has also reduced phone bills to and from vehicles, which in turn has improved both productivity and driver safety. Built into the system is a messaging capability that allows driver instructions to be sent to vehicles automatically.

The organisation has chosen a system from Masternaut, which not only reports on the vehicles' positions, but also records routes and times at each location automatically. Previously drivers had to keep such records manually - and given that there are 500,000 such location reports a year, this meant a lot of clerical work.

 

As Andy Pearson of Sandwell Metropolitan Council sums it up: "Whether seen as a cost saver, safety tool or independent performance assessor, the system provides benefits all round."

Convinced now? We think we are.