- Client: City of Saskatoon Public Works Roadways Section
- Vendor: Grey Island Systems
- Product: Interfleet Automated Vehicle Location Service. A real-time vehicle location and reporting system that uses GPS to provide location, speed and direction and other vehicle information via a standard Internet connection and browser. Data is collected and archived by the Grey Island data centre and can be viewed in real-time or historically.
Winter hits hard in Saskatchewan's largest city, and when it does the city's fleet of snow removal equipment goes into 24-hour operation until the main roads are clear. Twenty motor graders go through 900 blades a year plowing thousands of truckloads of snow to where it can be removed.
It's usually too cold for salt to thaw the ice on the streets, so the city relies on 23 sand spreaders that have to spread sand fast enough and often enough to meet provincially-mandated service-level commitments. The sander operators and supervisors are up to the task of spreading the sand, but proving the job is done properly has traditionally been a counterproductive trial for the city department.
"[Our] operators had to fill out very detailed daily logs about which streets they were sanding and at which times," explains City of Saskatoon roadways manager Jeff Jorgenson. "The problem with that was, in the middle of a snowstorm operators had to pull over [to periodically document their work] or wait for a number of hours and try to remember which streets they sanded and at which time. It was about 30 minutes per shift to fill out the paperwork. That wasn't very effective."
Saskatoon roadways manager Jeff Jorgenson (inset) says the Interfleet GPS-based system saves the city money, and means plow operators don't have to pull over in the middle of snowstorms to fill out detailed logs listing which streets they sanded at which times.
The search for a solution was on.
"We talked to other agencies about what they were using. There were a lot of custom-built applications and they were very expensive," Mr. Jorgenson said.
The original idea for a system called Interfleet came from a place far away from Saskatoon snowstorms. It was the fruit of a discussion between brothers Andrew and Owen Moore and brother-in-law Brian Boychuk as they enjoyed a summer's eve in Ontario's cottage country. The company they founded in 1998, Grey Island, bears the name of the Muskoka atoll where the family cottage is located.
The homey roots belie a company that is making post-bust dot.com dreams come true. Grey Island has grown to 20 people, and the revenue from the first two quarters of fiscal 2004 surpassed what the software developer brought in during the whole of 2002. The company regularly beats out bigger competitors in contract bids, has won more than 70 per cent of the Canadian public sector market, and it's breaking into the U.S.
Interfleet's vehicle-mounted black box correlates Global Positioning System (GPS) data with information from sensors and/or controllers mounted on the vehicle, or even feeding information from the engine computer via a patented interface. The data stream is transmitted to the Interfleet data centre using whatever wireless system is the most economical in the customer's operating area - be it radio, satellite or cellular data modem.
Equipping a vehicle typically costs around $1,000 (Cdn.). The box, which is the most expensive part, can be easily switched between pre-wired vehicles. Setting up the system's back end is even simpler, because most desktop computers already have Internet access and a browser.
"Interfleet is a full-blown fleet management app delivered over the Internet on a private site accessed via username and password," explains Grey Island CFO Owen Moore. "When you log in, you're looking at a map with some vehicles on the map. It's live, so when the vehicles move out on the road you will see them move on the map. The entire fleet is updated every 100 metres of travel or periodically if they don't move.
"There are two main purposes to the application," Mr. Moore added. "There's the dispatch side — to know where your vehicle is and to dispatch the most appropriate vehicle given the location of the call.
"The other aspect is that we store all the data, which can then be used to confirm adherence to schedules or policies. Our major space that we play in is government, so we do ambulances, snowplows and some transit vehicles."
Grey Island has thus far chosen not to offer what some might think would be a popular feature, though.
"We've had more than one request to locate all the Tim Hortons [donut and coffee shops] on the maps, that's for sure," Owen Moore chuckles.
Once Mr. Jorgenson saw Interfleet in action, he said the decision was simple.
"When they did the demo with us in 1999, they got a map of the city from our mapping guys. They plugged a GPS system in to a sweeper and within an hour we had a system up and running with street names and the map of the city," Mr. Jorgenson said. "It was very easy to implement. It wasn't a case of spending hundreds of thousands [of dollars] to build maps, implement hardware and tie everything in."
The operational returns were immediate.
"From the safety point of view our sanding operators can focus on getting their main job done and the technology will look after their paperwork done for them," Mr. Jorgenson said.
"We are able to report concisely what streets have been sanded when and what streets haven't at the touch of a button. That information is absolutely golden to operators and supervisors coming on shift."
Interfleet has exceeded budgetary targets, as well.
"The payback we were looking at was three-to-one," Mr. Jorgenson said. "Since then, the GPS service charges have gone down and our equipment and labour costs have gone up, but I am confident that out return is greater than three-to-one."
There have also been some unexpected intangible benefits.
"Just this winter a sanding operator saw there had been a traffic accident [at an icy intersection]. As a courtesy he went by and gave them a blast of sand. He ended up getting a ticket because the police, who were standing outside their vehicles, suspected he was speeding when he went through the site," Mr. Jorgenson said.
"He came to up to us and said 'Man I don't know what happened. I wasn't speeding.' So we pulled the GPS records and could demonstrate the speed he was travelling and were able to get him out of the ticket.
"The flip side is; had he been speeding we would have been able to prove that. That's the way we view GPS — it gives you the facts. Sometimes the facts work for you and sometimes they work against you, but at least you have the facts," Mr. Jogenson said.
"Now that we have it [Interfleet], we wouldn't be prepared to do business without it. It's like saying 'What would you do without your microwave?' Yeah, I could live without it, but why would I?"
