Miami-Dade County Routes Trucks with Greater Efficiency

Department of Solid Waste Management, Miami-Dade County, Florida

The Miami-Dade Department of Solid Waste Management uses ArcLogistics to increase the efficiency of specialized routing. The Solid Waste Division acquired two copies of the software and disposed of previous manual routing methods that involved paper cards, static maps, and employee guesswork and now uses desktop software for fully automating its routes.

"We had a goal to cut the time it takes between a customer call with a request and our fulfilling that request," says Karen Grassi, senior systems analyst, Miami-Dade County, Applications Consulting Services Division. "We were able to meet that goal with ArcLogistics because we had an automated, efficient method for getting trucks routed quickly and relatively easily." Service requests that once took two weeks to fulfill are now completed in three days. Data that was once managed using paper forms and static maps is now seamlessly integrated.

When the county acquired ArcLogistics, it quickly input its own detailed street network dataset. A service development department takes calls all day for illegal dumping, litter, and collection. Approximately four clerks are available to take calls. Good data tracking is now taking place, whereas in the past, data was disparate and not as easily accessible for query.

One of the department's newly developed, efficient methods is dubbed the Go Back program. Citizens leave collection items curbside Mondays and Tuesdays with pickup occurring the following pickup day. Once a year, citizens can request that items such as couches, broken-down refrigerators, and other larger items be collected.

Combined, these programs result in an average of 300 to 600 pickups daily. During regularly scheduled garbage route service, the county field crews identify locations for specialized pickups. Locations are called in by field crews and are logged in by service staff for next-day pickup. A trash crew is then routed using ArcLogistics for the Go Back service. Previous methods would take all day to do routing; using ArcLogistics, the current service route is processed in less than an hour with service guaranteed in just three days.