Glossary
Fleet Optimisation
Balancing work across an entire fleet of trucks and crews to serve all customers with the fewest vehicles, miles, and hours.
What is fleet optimization?
Fleet optimization is balancing work across an entire fleet of trucks and crews to serve all customers with the fewest vehicles, miles, and hours.
Fleet optimization explained
Where route optimization improves individual routes, fleet optimization asks the bigger question: how many trucks does this fleet truly need, and how should work divide among them? It is where the largest savings live, because removing a route removes a truck, a driver shift, fuel, and maintenance simultaneously. Fleet optimization projects typically follow service changes, growth, acquisitions, or a hard look at aging assumptions.
Frequently asked questions
How much can fleet optimization save in waste collection?
Fleet optimization can save waste collection double-digit costs in typical engagements by answering the structural question: how many trucks does this fleet truly need, and how should work divide among them. Removing a route removes a vehicle, a shift, fuel, and maintenance simultaneously.
When should haulers and cities run fleet optimization?
Haulers and cities should run fleet optimization when the shape of the work changes: introducing new services, changing collection frequency, switching vehicle types, absorbing sustained growth, or integrating an acquisition. It also depends on clean historical data, which is why it typically follows digitization by some months.
How do you test waste fleet changes before they go live?
Fleet changes get tested before they go live in optimization software that models them: varied collection frequencies, different shift patterns, swapped vehicle types, and moved depots, each evaluated for cost and feasibility in a sandbox. The value is comparing futures cheaply, since the expensive mistake is reorganizing a fleet around an untested assumption.