Dubbo Regional Council: $180,000 in fuel and maintenance savings with Geotab

Dubbo Regional Council, in the Central West of New South Wales, runs a large fleet of vehicles and equipment, which it uses to deliver services to residents across an area of 7500 square kilometres. The Council wanted to improve visibility over its fleet, both to rein in costs and to drive sustainability.

But when they teamed up with Geotab to achieve these goals, they discovered that our telematics solutions could also be deployed to help fix roads, oversee recycling collection and manage local parks too. 

Since it began using Geotab’s telematics solutions, Dubbo Regional Council has: 

• Been able to create heat maps to guide road maintenance  
• Improved recycling enforcement by leveraging commercial fleet cameras from Geotab’s partner network 
• Identified almost $180,000 worth of savings in diesel and $40,000 in vehicle maintenance savings
• Identified a problem with idling vehicles, some of which were idling for more than 28% of the time they were in use.  

The challenge: visibility and cost savings 

Dubbo Regional Council covers an expansive area in far western NSW and has 800 pieces of equipment to service this area ranging from trailers to garbage trucks.

Manager Fleet and Depot Services at Dubbo Regional Council Daniel Peterson approached Geotab because he was looking for ways to reduce costs. Because he didn’t have much visibility over his fleet, he wasn’t sure which vehicles were responsible for the higher costs.  

It wasn’t until he started working with Geotab’s fleet telematics that he began to figure out why fleet services were proving more costly than expected. 

The solution: fleet transparency and innovation  

The Council has trialled Geotab devices across 40 of its vehicles. The solutions immediately helped the Council reduce its costs, with inexpensive installation quickly offset by cost benefits from being able to monitor fuel consumption. With Geotab’s solutions, it became apparent that the Council had an issue with Council workers leaving their vehicles idling, which added to fuel, maintenance and depreciation costs. 

But it is the novel uses of telematics for daily Council operations which really sets Dubbo Regional Council apart. One key innovation is the use of their pothole filling machines to help them seamlessly plan road upgrades. The vehicles that fix the roads feed that information back into Geotab’s database, which can then be used to map out the conditions of roads in the area.     

“Over the last 12 months, the Council has fixed 2015 potholes. We also put that in a heat map and then the engineers are using that to decide what roads need reshaping and what roads might need more work than the others.”

– Manager Fleet and Depot Services at Dubbo Regional Council

The Council is also using data from its street sweepers to double check that no streets are missed, ensuring better service and enabling the Council to better respond to ratepayer complaints. It is also using devices to better manage its parks, working out which mowing tasks have been completed and how much time each one took.  

Another innovative use is to monitor contamination of green waste bins. Contamination can be a bigger problem than many residents realise. 

“The council’s green waste is processed at our waste facility to create high-quality mulch and top dressing for community green spaces and sporting fields. However, when contamination is present in the green waste, each piece must be manually removed at the processing plant, significantly increasing production costs and potentially compromising the quality of the final product.”

– Manager Fleet and Depot Services at Dubbo Regional Council

Using the fleet telematics and the cameras connected to Geotab devices, the Council is now able to identify where the contamination came from, and follow up with repeat offenders, which will hopefully result in fewer contamination incidents in the future. 

Impact: lower costs and better services 

The cost impact for Dubbo Regional Council was both immediate and considerable. The solutions have also helped the Council to improve its services. Geotab’s telematics solutions have helped with:

• Identifying close to $180,000 in savings: Geotab helped slash diesel expenses, as well as $40,000 in maintenance savings.
• Addressing idling: In some cases, vehicles were idling for more than 28% of the time that they were in use. In some vehicles, such as graders, this could affect the resale value by $50,000 through depreciation. 
• Improving civic services: Geotab helped the Council improve road services, better maintain parks and reduce the contamination of green waste. 
• Winning an award: The Council’s deployment of telematics has been so novel that it recently received the inaugural Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia Fleet Innovation Award.

The next steps: wider applications for Geotab solutions

Dubbo Regional Council plans to roll out the devices to 280 vehicles in total. As it expands Geotab solutions to more vehicles, it is likely to uncover more savings and other fleet optimisation opportunities. 

The Council is one of the first to use our devices in ways that go beyond monitoring vehicle-related functions. It may well find even more uses for Geotab solutions that could deliver better services to local residents too.