Route design used to be a task municipal and private haulers undertook a handful of times over the course of their careers. As these planned routes evolved, longtime drivers absorbed the changes, and together with their supervisors and managers, the team just made things work — often with the aid of paper-based maps, a whiteboard, and a few hours spent in the conference room.

More and more frequent changes, however, now influence solid waste collection and highlight the need for a better and more iterative route design process. These changing influences span the full breadth of solid waste management to include the municipal solid waste profile, collection streams, population and household makeup, vehicle fleets, customer expectations, and of course, funding.

For many haulers, route inefficiencies brought about by such changes have crept in bit by bit over several years. Now, the pandemic and its continued fallout are bringing route inefficiency into its sharpest focus yet.

With a driver shortage, skyrocketing fuel prices, and increasing environmental reporting demands hammering municipalities and haulers, the time to design efficient routes and develop a plan for continuous improvement in relation to route efficiency was yesterday. The second-best time, as the saying goes, is today.

Route optimization software can help.

Indeed, when private hauler Meridian Waste, headquartered in Charlotte, N.C. undertook route optimization in one of its markets, it realized a number of benefits. They freed up 34 percent of solid waste vehicles and eliminated 26 percent of trash routes while reducing route miles and related emissions by 21 percent. Another plus: They were able to phase out aging collection vehicles without the need to replace them.

Certainly route optimization can be worthwhile — with savings ringing in at 10 to 15 percent across such projects. With so much at stake, it’s worth following best practices to nail it the first time.

1 | Define goals

Do you want to balance routes and workloads, deliver better service, or reduce your number of trucks? Or perhaps you’re changing collection frequency, adding new services, or consolidating routes following a merger or acquisition.

A growing company making regular acquisitions, Meridian Waste provides residential, municipal, and commercial hauling, plus roll-off, special waste, and construction/demolition services. When the company acquires new routes, it uses route optimization software from EasyRoute to streamline collections. As Patrick Messinger, area president for South Carolina, put it: “EasyRoute was a key pivot for us. We’ve used it in all our markets to help us hit our goals.”

Defining the outcomes you seek, as well as their priority, will allow you to scope and resource the project properly before you begin.

2 | Resource properly

Once you’ve defined goals for your route optimization project and scoped appropriately, it’s important to resource the project properly.
Ideally, one person can take ownership of the project and software. This person can coordinate teams, keep projects on track, and make sure you have the modeling data you need.

If you can dedicate someone to this role and make the project their primary responsibility, the process of route planning is apt to run much more quickly and smoothly.

Regardless of the size of your team, taking a realistic view of available resources at the outset will help you build an achievable timeline with milestones that energize team members and help keep the momentum going— all the way to the finish line.

3 | Develop scenarios

Of course, making the most of resources is at the heart of optimization. Placing the right trucks and drivers in the right places at the right times delivers the efficiencies that make undertaking route redesign worthwhile.

By starting with a set of core scenarios, and their unique dependencies, you can use route optimization software to test each one and determine exactly what resource will be needed to deliver.

If you take the time to develop these test scenarios with real-world data, the optimized results will be quicker to evaluate. In addition, you’ll avoid rework as different requirements present themselves.

With its IT Manager for the Division of Waste Management, Eddie Dean, at the helm, the City of Lexington, Ky. was able to reroute collections of 360,000 carts across garbage, recycling and yard waste streams in just three months with EasyRoute route optimization software. By planning and resourcing properly, and selecting the right tool, Dean and his team saved considerable time on a project that previously would have taken two years.

This is the first piece in a two-part series about Best Practices for Route Optimization. Find part two here.

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