By training your drivers on the importance of good weight practices, using tools and procedures to help them monitor their weight, planning routes effectively and keeping good records, you are creating a more efficient business while improving your company鈥檚 reputation and making your community a better place.
Alissa Stoops
Most of us want to make the world a better place. And helping your community is not only the right the thing to do, it鈥檚 also good for business. Customers, like you, have an investment in making their highways and neighborhoods safer. For refuse companies who care about the places where they do business, eliminating overweight vehicles is a logical choice. Vehicles that do not exceed legal weight limits are less likely to damage roads and less likely to be involved in accidents, keeping your community safer. Monitoring vehicle weights is the right thing to do, and it鈥檚 worth investing time and money in.
However, maintaining legal weights can be challenging. Without the proper tools, drivers will be unaware of when they are driving overweight or might be in the middle of their route when they reach their legal weight limit, miles away from a transfer station. It may even be tempting for a driver to ignore an overweight truck in order to complete a route in less time. But it is possible to combat these challenges and remain within legal weight limits with proper planning and the right resources.
Begin with Company Policies
Successful business practices start at the top. According to the results of the 2013 Culture and Change Management Survey, conducted by the Katzenbach Center, 84 percent of high-ranking businesspeople feel that company culture is critical to creating change in an organization.1 Fostering a company culture where driving overweight is unacceptable is perhaps the single most important thing you can do to prevent it from occurring.
In practical terms, this means management needs to stress the importance of following legal weight limits and make sure to respect those limits themselves. Your company should have a zero tolerance policy for driving overweight due to the liability, potential for fines and the damage it can do to the community鈥攊t is in your best interest as a company to enforce this policy rigorously.
Follow Up with Driver Training
Companies that have been successful at changing their culture and preventing overweight driving usually require drivers to attend comprehensive safety training. Educated drivers know the importance of following legal driving and vehicle requirements, the potential hazards that accompany driving overweight, and your company鈥檚 penalties for driving overweight and breaking other traffic laws. Training courses ought to stress the increased liability for drivers and for the refuse company should an overweight vehicle be involved in an accident. For example, overweight vehicles take almost double the distance to come to a full stop2, putting your company鈥檚 driver, other drivers on the road and pedestrians at risk. Driving overweight also puts great strain on vehicles, causing them to break down more frequently. Along with education about the dangers of driving overweight, include detailed information about your local weight limitations in your company鈥檚 safety training course. Educating drivers and providing the expectation that they will follow legal weight limits from the day they are hired will go a long way toward preventing your vehicles from being overweight on your community鈥檚 streets.
Equip Your Vehicles with the Right Tools
The most essential tool for preventing overweight vehicles is a quality on-board scale that provides accurate axle weights and gross vehicle weight. With an on-board scale, drivers can monitor vehicle weight as they are running their route. It鈥檚 important that the weight display is mounted in the cab in a location that is easy to read, so that drivers will be able to easily view the information without taking time from their routes. Drivers should be instructed to monitor the vehicle weight regularly, no less often than every half-hour. As soon as the legal limit has been reached, drivers should know to head to a transfer station immediately鈥攅ven if they aren鈥檛 currently near one. It is also important that drivers are well-versed in using on-board scales and are able to locate the information they need quickly.
On-board scales often include or are compatible with overweight alarms, which will go even further toward preventing overweight vehicles from being on the road. Alarms can inform the driver when the truck is approaching legal limits, as well as when the truck has reached the weight where it should no longer continue to pick up refuse. Alarms can be unobtrusive, located only on the scale display, or they can include external lights, buzzers or other sound-makers which demand the driver鈥檚 attention. Some alarms can even be used to temporarily deactivate the truck鈥檚 arms, making it impossible to add further weight to the refuse load until the vehicle has been emptied.
Use Weight to Plan Your Routes
Although teaching and enforcing good driver practices and providing drivers with weight monitoring tools are excellent steps in the direction of preventing overweight vehicles, route organization is equally important. Planning routes to take into account when trucks typically reach their maximum legal weight is a key step. If drivers are many miles from a transfer station when their trucks reach maximum weight, they are much more likely to continue to pick up refuse in order to follow the route and avoid backtracking.
On-board scales can be a major part of planning routes. The weight data reported on a scale can help a company see where there is a high concentration of refuse and where there is less. Some on-board scales for front-loading refuse vehicles can even report the weights of individual bins, helping you to pin down the exact locations where weight is the greatest. This information will help you decide how to arrange routes so that drivers visit the transfer station as soon as their truck reaches maximum legal weight capacity. In some situations it may increase efficiency to stop at the transfer station before the truck reaches maximum weight to avoid extra out-of-route miles. It may even make sense to alter the route completely in order to make the most legal pickups while driving fewer miles.
Foster Greater Customer Relationships
Good weight practices and the tools you use to monitor and maintain weight can help you establish rapport with your customers. If your reputation as an organization puts community safety and customer needs ahead of company profit, you will gain and keep customers who value integrity.
To that end, organizations that are successful at preventing overweight vehicles adopt and prioritize a company-wide practice of good record-keeping. Keeping track of each route鈥檚 weights, and of individual bin weights for front-loading scales that empty very heavy bins, provides you with the information to make good decisions and identify problems as soon as they appear. Good records also create indisputable evidence that your company is making decisions that will benefit your entire community. This information can be used in marketing campaigns, not only increasing your business revenue, but also fostering trust between your business and members of your community. Records of route and individual bin weights can be recorded in a number of ways through on-board scales. Many scales can be connected to a printer, which the driver can use to create a hard copy of weights at the end of each route. Or, for companies interested in going paperless, scales can also be connected with existing on-board computers in refuse trucks, which can often send weights directly to the office computer. Some scales can even use Bluetooth to send weight data from the weight display in the truck cab to a computer in the office. All of these options allow you to create a record of your weight practices for internal and external use.
All of this record keeping can help you further establish and maintain a reputation as honest, upstanding community members by helping you set fair and consistent prices. Emptying trucks as soon as they reach maximum legal weight and recording weights means you have a record of exactly how much refuse you have picked up on any given day. Averaging these weights can give you a much more accurate estimate of your business costs than simply using the number of trips drivers make to the transfer station. Scales for front-loading vehicles can also be used to audit individual bins. Knowing individual bin weights can not only help you re-work routes in commercial districts with extremely heavy refuse loads, but can also help you price your larger bins more fairly and accurately.
Following these practices may seem like extra work, but it is work that pays off. By establishing a company culture of upholding legal weight requirements, training your drivers on the importance of good weight practices, using tools and procedures to help them monitor their weight, planning routes effectively and keeping good records, you are acting as a good neighbor. You are creating a more efficient business while improving your company鈥檚 reputation by helping make your community a better place. And that鈥檚 worth working for.
Alissa Stoops is a technical and marketing writer with Air-Weigh, Inc. She has a background in teaching college composition, and has written for the trucking industry for several years. For more information about Air-Weigh, contact Tricia Baker, Marketing Manager, at (541) 349-8590 or via e-mail at [email protected].
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Notes
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- 鈥淭he 2013 Culture and Change Management Survey.鈥� Strategy&, January 9, 2015.
- Antich, Mike. 鈥淥verloading is the No. 1 Danger Facing Your Fleet.鈥� Automotive Fleet, January 9, 2015. www.automotive-fleet.com/blog/market-trends/story/2011/11/overloading-is-the-no-1-danger-facing-your-fleet.aspx.
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