Senior managers at Goodfellow Brothers General Contractor (www.goodfellowbros.com) face a geographical challenge like few others in their profession. They must coordinate the activities of fleet operations and several maintenance shops separated by more than 2,500 miles of Pacific Ocean and spread out over a vast area that includes three time zones.
The fourth-generation family-owned company operates a fleet of 1,200 vehicles and earth-moving equipment on several project sites on all five of the Hawaiian islands, and in Oregon and Washington. The company works on a variety of different construction projects, including airport runways and taxiways, marinas, bridges, other road transportation projects and site preparation for housing and business developments.
Coordinating the maintenance and operations of that many pieces of equipment over the company’s huge territory is the responsibility of a small group of Goodfellow Brothers managers at the company’s headquarters in Wenatchee, Wash. The group has always successfully managed the fleet operations, maintained safety awareness and kept on top of equipment and truck repairs, says Richard Kornmann, visual inspection analyst for Goodfellow Brothers.
“Still, we knew we could do better,” he allows. “We suspected that we had problems with excessive weekend vehicle usage and idling, and with illegible, incomplete and inconsistent vehicle inspection reports.”
The company also had drivers speeding to and from work sites and through them to get to work, to stay on schedule or to finish their assignments.
“Without some way of measuring what was happening, we really had no idea about the extent of these issues,” Kornmann says. “We certainly couldn’t hold our employees accountable for things we weren’t tracking.”
A SOLUTION
In investigating ways to gain better control of its operations, Goodfellow Brothers’ managers looked into telematics solutions. Starting in 2010, they, with help from Zonar (www.zonarsystems.com) – a company that provides electronic fleet inspection, tracking and operations solutions for public and private fleets – implemented a four-phased telematics project to improve the safety and efficiency of the company’s fleet operations.
The first phase involved equipping the company’s fleet of about 450 pickup trucks with Zonar’s telematics system, and then monitoring usage through the Zonar Ground Traffic Control web application. During the second phase, which started a year later, the company outfitted its construction vehicles – including dump trucks and about 650 earth-moving units – with the Zonar telematics system and the company’s electronic vehicle inspection reporting (EVIR) system.
The third phase involved monitoring the fuel usage and emissions of its rock crushers. During the fourth phase, Goodfellow Brothers provided suppliers with Zonar’s portable telematics devices to get a more complete view of its work sites.
FUEL COST SAVINGS
“During the first phase, we monitored how pickup trucks were driven and operated, then we used the information in a training program to counsel drivers,” Kornmann says.
Within a year, Goodfellow Brothers achieved an immediate drop in weekend vehicle usage, speeding and idling. By cutting the incidences of idling in half, the company realized an annual savings of about $54,000 in fuel costs.
“In the reports generated by Zonar, the amount of time each truck spent idling surprised us all, particularly the drivers,” he notes. “Before we implemented the telematics system, it wasn’t uncommon for us to see our trucks and equipment burn as much as $600 worth of fuel each week just idling.”
After implementing the telematics solution and providing drivers counseling on how to reduce their idling, “we saw the amount of fuel burned due to idling reduce to $160 to $180 per week,” he says. “Now it’s rare if we break $100 per week in fuel costs due to idling, and that’s usually on account of traffic, and incidences of speeding are practically nil.”
SHOP EFFICIENCIES
During the second phase of the rollout, Goodfellow Brothers established a two-tier program that indicates the severity and importance of issues discovered by vehicle and equipment operators during their pre- and post-trip inspections. The alerts also prioritize issues reported by onboard equipment and vehicle sensors and computers, such as engine performance.
“Any issue or problem that could inflict injury or endanger the lives of our employees or others, or lead to further damage to a machine, is considered a red alert,” explains John Stump, equipment department manager for Goodfellow Brothers. “Yellow alerts are for issues that should be addressed, but don’t require immediate attention.”
An example of a red alert would be a vehicle inspection report that says the back-up alarm isn’t working. The unit would be taken out of service until this is fixed.
In many cases, particular problems – like non-working back-up alarms – are already preset as red-alert issues on Zonar’s EVIR, Stump notes. But the inspection application allows equipment or vehicle operators to reclassify yellow-alert issues with a higher, red-alert priority when they deem the situation requires it.
IN THE LOOP
Alerts are immediately communicated back to Goodfellow Brothers’ maintenance shops where technicians can then schedule the repair when the vehicle returns to the shop or assign a remote service repair truck if the vehicle or equipment can’t be driven or moved to the shop.
Red alerts are also communicated to dispatchers and to senior managers at the company’s headquarters. These managers follow up a few days later to see if the local maintenance shop has completed the repair or needs more resources to finish the job.
Stump says this two-tier alert system helped the company “significantly increase the amount of scheduled work” the company’s maintenance shops can complete in a week. Drivers are now able to identify potential maintenance issues so they can be addressed long before they cause equipment breakdowns and become unscheduled work, which can slow or even stop progress at work sites.
“We’ve been able to achieve better than the industry standard of 65 percent efficiency at our maintenance shop in Maui and 55 to 60 percent efficiency at our other locations,” he points out.
Shop efficiency is measured in how much scheduled work gets done each week. A 65 percent efficiency means the shop has completed 65 percent of its scheduled work.
DEEPER INISGHTS
For the telematics program’s third phase, Goodfellow Brothers added Zonar RFID tags to its crushing equipment.
When the crushing equipment gets refueled, employees can scan the RFID tags and report the amount of fuel they put into the machines and the number of hours the machines have run. This allows managers to closely monitor fuel usage and emissions.
For the program’s fourth phase, Goodfellow Brothers provided trucking companies that haul equipment and supplies to and from its work sites with Zonar telematics units that plug into a cigarette lighter. These plug-and-play devices offer Goodfellow Brothers a more accurate look into what’s happening at the work sites when supplies and equipment are delivered.
Goodfellow Brothers’ Stump says managers can use the suppliers’ arrival and unloading times to gain additional work site efficiencies.
“We can see if suppliers and vendors are having to wait to unload their equipment or supplies,” he says. “That can indicate to us that we have some scheduling problems or other delays on the work site that need to be addressed.”
TRANSPARENCY
Goodfellow Brothers management provides customers and regulatory agencies access to the detailed reports that telematics equipment offers. This enables them to, among other things, know when supplies and equipment are delivered, as well as know when trucks and other equipment are inspected, determine if there were any issues found and see how quickly those problems were fixed.
“We’ve found that regulators and customers appreciate the level of transparency this provides them,” says Stump.
Along with the operational savings and efficiencies, he says, the driver inspection capabilities from the telematics solution lets Goodfellow Brothers “focus and improve on equipment safety. That, coupled with the transparency we can offer our customers and to regulatory agencies, demonstrates that we don’t just talk about safety, we live it in everything we do.”
