Reporting From The Road

Summit Energy Services in Williston, N.D., has grown quickly on the shoulders of the Bakken shale oil boom, and its large, decentralized fleet of trucks was cumbersome to manage until the company implemented a new program.

Beginning with only six employees at its founding in 2010, Summit now employs 165 people working the oilfields on the western edges of North Dakota. The company specializes in oilfield services such as road building, pad and flow line construction, storage tank fabrication and site reclamation.

The company implemented Ford Crew Chief Powered by Telogis as a way of managing factors such as truck idling, asset utilization and ensuring the safety of its workforce, and has noticed additional benefits in the process, including simplified reporting and a new way of working with its dealer service department to ensure optimal fleet performance.

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Understanding telematics

Summit’s fleet includes approximately 100 vehicles that range in size from Ford F-150 pickup trucks to large flatbed semi trailers. Many telematics systems will work with numerous truck brands in this way. Ford Crew Chief, for instance, is offered by Ford but is compatible with other manufacturers – Summit has the system outfitted on a number of Dodge and Kenworth trucks as well.

The system is anchored by a “black box” wired into the truck that collects and transmits data back to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) program that selected employees – typically fleet and operations managers – can access. Travis Edwards, operations manager for Summit Energy Services, has also extended full access to his maintenance and safety departments, while specific superintendents have customized access to their specific employees and vehicles. The company has also extended access to its Ford dealer service department.

The advantage of this SaaS program is that it can be accessed with any internet-enabled device. The user can log in on any computer, tablet or smartphone and does not have to worry about installing any software or maintaining new computer systems – and, in many cases, the software is automatically updated with the newest available features automatically by the provider.

Engine idling saps fuel efficiency

Engine idling is a hot point in fleet management circles because it drives up fuel consumption and adds unnecessary hours to the truck’s engine. The telematics system identifies engine idling and alerts management, allowing them to work with the drivers and educate them on ways to reduce idling. The frigid cold temperatures of North Dakota in winter require a certain amount of idling to properly warm engines and protect employees from the elements, but the company has still been able to reduce engine idling by 75 percent just through identifying causes of the issue and working with drivers to curtail that behavior.

“It’ll send an email alert to me if a vehicle is idling longer than 15 minutes,” Edwards says. “We caught quite a few in the beginning and now it’s very rare that I get an email that a vehicle is idling.”

Proper asset utilization drives intelligent business

One of the primary reasons Summit uses the telematics system is to determine the proper allocation and utilization of its fleet. This ranges from ensuring the right people are in the right location, to determining when new trucks need to be purchased to keep up with demand. It gives management real-time visibility into the location of people and vehicles and helps ensure that the closest personnel available to respond to immediate needs are properly routed, rather than sending someone else out from headquarters – ultimately saving time
and resources.

“It seems to help our superintendents quite a bit,” Edwards says. “They can actually see where their guys are, and coordinate and distribute it, whereas in the past we were relying on cellphones and calling back and forth ‘where you at, where you at?’ One glance at [the software display] and you know where they’re at.”

One recent example involved a maintenance problem with a truck. Summit was able to route a nearby maintenance crew rather than sending out another team from headquarters.

“My maintenance guy was coming back from the field, someone else called in and said they needed help,” Edwards says. “I was able to stop him and turn him around. I knew he was close – he was within a mile. Whereas otherwise we would have had to send someone from the shop here, and that saved us a bunch of time and money.”

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The system also aids in identifying underutilized vehicles and moving them to divisions within the company where they may be needed. One alert that Edwards has programmed lets him know if a truck sits without being started for more than two days. This makes him aware of a possible asset that could be used somewhere else in the company.

“Any one truck can cost us a job, and one job can cost us our reputation with a particular company,” Edwards says. “In the long run that costs a lot of money.”

Chief Operating Officer Will Reedy takes it one step further, and notes that the ability to identify an underutilized asset and move it to a division where it is needed versus buying a new truck makes a significant step towards justifying ROI.

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“We’re doing a lot of time-and-materials contracts with oil companies, and every day your fleet is not aligned with your work … it’s not making money,” Reedy says. “Having a right-size fleet, knowing that all the units that we have are being used – to come in with real information that [details utilization by each crew], it allows you to be objective because you have good information to make those decisions. You really only have to make one bad decision and buy an extra F-450 for $50,000 to tip the scales in the wrong direction.”

Used correctly, keeping a close eye on how these trucks are utilized can also play a significant role in asset life extension. Summit plans to more closely monitor mileage with the system.

“We’re going to try and rotate vehicles so that the vehicles with lesser miles take the longer trips, and we’ll keep the trucks with higher mileages closer to town,” Edwards says.

New American frontier presents safety challenges

Another primary reason companies implement telematics solutions is for safety, and that’s twofold: always knowing exactly where your crew is, and identifying driving behaviors that could be dangerous to your employees and your vehicles.

“We’re extremely isolated in some areas,” Edwards says. “You can break down in the middle of nowhere with no phone reception and be stuck there. With the winters we have in North Dakota, that’s pretty dangerous. Now you’ve got a way to find somebody – if a vehicle hasn’t moved in a certain amount of time you can go look for them and find out exactly where they’re at.”

Driving-related accidents are one of the leading causes of injury and death in the workplace. Accidents also lead to downtime for employees and trucks, possible vehicle replacement costs and increased insurance premiums. Curbing behaviors that lead to accidents, such as excessive speeding, hard braking and hard acceleration help reduce the likelihood of accidents. Summit regularly posts a scorecard of driver safety metrics to foster a sense of competition and pride among its drivers. The result has been an 80 to 90 percent reduction in driver safety alerts since the system was implemented. That helps save costs and also helps protect Summit’s image with the community.

“We want to make sure everyone goes home at night, and everyone sees our emblem on the side of our trucks,” Edwards says. “Every vehicle represents Summit, so it’s important.”

Summit partners with dealer for service program

One of the unique keystones of Summit’s telematics program is that they have partnered with their primary Ford dealer, Select Ford of Williston, to share maintenance-related data on its entire fleet. This allows the service department to see in real time the same alerts Summit sees as it relates to vehicle maintenance, which includes everything from vehicle diagnostic codes to tire pressure and percentage of engine oil life remaining.

Select is able to more effectively schedule and prepare for the truck to come in for repair as it can see exactly what is wrong on the computer screen while the truck is still out in the field. It then immediately schedules the truck for repair – an immediacy that is appreciated in a boomtown with too many trucks and not enough mechanics.

Ed Steckler, owner and general manager of Select Ford of Williston, says the earlier he knows about a truck needing service, the earlier he can get it in. “In the purest state, if you still had a first-come, first-served service department, the first one in gets served first. And with all the demand here we have to have a little bit of that,” Steckler says. “With Summit it allows us to treat them a little more special. A lot of it has to do with information.”

Additional benefits drive improvement

Ford Crew Chief has also helped Summit better report on mileage and fuel used between North Dakota and Montana. As each state has different taxes for fuel purchased and used on their state roads, the system allows Summit to identify exactly how much mileage and fuel was used on which roads, and can export that data into a concise report.

“That’s wonderful for the semis in our fleet,” Edwards says. “Those have apportioned plates and [adhere to the] International Fuel Tax Agreement. So we pay taxes for every mile we drive on whatever state’s road, and whatever fuel that is purchased in each state. Telogis has a report that will print out for me that tells me what state they drove in and for however many miles, and I just hand that over and it’s done in a couple of minutes, compared to before where everyone wrote it down and tried to remember what state they were in.”

The system also allows Edwards to switch back and forth between a standard map view and satellite imagery. This has helped in instances where they are navigating crews to a pad that may require additional direction beyond what is available on the standard map.

“You can identify particular buildings and tell them what to look for when giving directions, and how a road curves in,” Edwards says. “The satellite view actually shows the layout of how a pad was built.”

It also helps improve customer service by providing irrefutable detail of a truck’s movements and actions throughout the day.

“If a customer has a question on a ticket ‘Did your guy work 10 hours?’, we can say ‘Yes, he worked 10 hours, this is when he left the shop, this is when he arrived on location and how long he was there, and here’s when he returned to the shop.’”

All of these benefits add up to provide efficiencies that help to better organize and manage a decentralized fleet of vehicles. When looked at wholly, the system provides net gains in productivity, utilization, safety and performance that positively affect the bottom line and help Summit manage its business in a booming work environment.

“We continue to invest in new vehicles, and especially if you’ve got a workforce spread out over a large geographic area that you’re not going to be able to touch every day, it’s got some big value,” Reedy says. “We’re putting it in all future trucks – it’s the right decision for us.”

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