A good deal of time was spent on the main stage talking about sustainability issues and the way that GIS technologies can be applied to decrease our impacts on the planet. One technology that had a good profile was ArcLogistics for fleet management. While the technology isn’t new, the application of the technology is even more important these days given the cost of fuel and the interest in reducing emissions.
A case study of building inspection routing was displayed for the City of Fort Collins. The daily workload of five inspectors was scheduled with both a manual process and an automated route planning using ArcLogistics. Their work was divided based on cost, skill sets, their work day and the work requirements. The automated process returned routes that significantly decreased the miles traveled and fuel costs, with a reduction of 20%.
On average the fuel reductions using automated routing returns a 15-30% savings. This cost savings was extrapolated for fleets of different sizes with ROI returns of close to $2 million for fleets of 200 vehicles. It was also demonstrated that time savings of automated routing could greatly reduce the workloads and even the requirement for workers and vehicles due to efficiency gains. The ArcLogistics Navigator capability also lets you push out the routing to in-vehicle GPS devices for turn-by-turn guidance.
At the close of this session sample copies of ArcLogistics 9.3 were distributed to anyone interested. Visit www.esri.com/routefleets for more info.
