Veolia achieves trailer fleet management with the highest ROI

All over the world, Veolia is known for their intelligent solutions for water, energy, and waste management. The Belgian branch of the company uses Sensolus trackers to optimize their business processes. In this customer story, you’ll find out how Veolia Belgium avoids unnecessary costs by pinpointing the time allocation of trailers and optimizing trailer usage.

“We did already have a fleet management system in place before using Sensolus”, Wim, Data Management Analyst at Veolia, explains. This system provides data about the vehicles of Veolia and keeps track of orders.

The challenge in their ERP system is that both a truck with a trailer and a truck without a trailer are labelled as an order. In other words, this makes it impossible to distinguish based on the orders whether a trailer is used or not.

This led to the Logistics department wanting to invest in new trailers. “They would ask Procurement to make investments in new ones, but at the same time we knew the allocation of the trailers could still be improved”, Wim explains.

So Veolia struggled to manage transportation means for their waste containers in the most optimal way. A waste container can either be transported on a truck or on a trailer. For a longer distance using a trailer is more efficient. Because with this kind of transportation two waste containers can be transported. Thus, to organize their services more optimally, Wim decided to equip their trailers with Sensolus trackers.

Before getting in touch with Sensolus, Wim was already in search of an asset tracking solution. Wim mentions he mainly looked at “traditional tracking solutions where a connection with an external power source is a must.” This didn’t suit their needs and significantly increased the cost because adjustments to their trucks would be needed to set-up the connection.

At a certain point, Wim got in touch with a European Sensolus customer. They informed him they use autonomous trackers from Sensolus to follow-up thousands of waste containers. “This is how we ended up testing Sensolus and finally chose them because of the good fit with our use case and reasonable pricing”, Wim adds.

Installing the trackers went really quick. Being active across the whole country, each person responsible for the technical services on a specific site installed the trackers. Currently, eighty trailers in Flanders and Brussels are equipped with trackers. After the installation, Wim explained the perks and practicalities of the Sensolus web application more in-depth to the Logistics Managers.

Knowing how long a trailer is used in a certain period of time is crucial for Veolia. With this information, they can easily determine the occupancy rate of their trailers. “We don’t need to know when exactly the trailer has been driving. We just need to verify how long the trailers have been in use”, Wim explains.

Equipping their trailers with trackers thus allows Veolia to optimize the use of their trailers in the field. In other words, it enables them to collect waste in a faster way.

As mentioned before, Veolia struggled with knowing how long their trailers are used in the field. With Sensolus they have insights into both the location and the usage of their trailers. This enables them to fulfill customer orders in a more efficient way.

In the meantime, they also set-up an alert for trailers that are not moving for too long. Setting up these alerts is an additional benefit they discovered along the way. The severity of alerts can vary, so you can determine yourself whether immediate action needs to be taken when receiving an alert.

“The alert system definitely opens doors for the future. Especially concerning containers with, for example, hazardous waste”, Wim adds. It would give Veolia the possibility to track containers that need extra caution and where alerts will build in extra security.

Before using Sensolus, Veolia already had a fleet management system in place. This is used to manage the inventory and plan maintenance. For future use cases with containers, it can be interesting to integrate Sensolus with their fleet management system.

Since it is challenging to know where a waste container is located, it would be the perfect opportunity to enrich the existing fleet data with location data gathered by the Sensolus tracker. “If a container needs maintenance, we would immediately be able to pinpoint where it is located”, Wim explains.

Concludingly, we can say that both the operational teams and fleet managers at Veolia can benefit from our solution. With Sensolus they are able to allocate trailers in a way that guarantees the highest ROI. Furthermore, discussions about investing in new trailers are no longer needed because of the crystal-clear overview of the trailers in stock and currently in use.