Four numbers, one day's work, and they range from 80% to 99%.
Every one of them is true, and which one appears in the monthly report decides whether your contract is in good standing or in breach. That is not a measurement problem. It is a definition problem, and it is worth settling before the contract is signed.
- 80.0%
- counted on lift events alone
- 91.3%
- with nothing left behind
- 98.8%
- of segments actually driven
- 5
- never reached, of 426
The gap between the first and the second is entirely bins that were never put out. A weighing system alone reports 80.0% and makes a crew doing its job look like a crew failing at it.
One round, segment by segment
In the order the vehicle drove them. Click any segment for what a complaint desk would need to answer for it.
76.8%
lifts only
90.2%
nothing left behind
100.0%
street was driven
8
segments genuinely failed
82 segments, in the order the vehicle drove them
Crew A
Pick any segment. This is the whole of what a complaint desk needs: whether the vehicle was there, how fast it was going, and whether the mechanism cycled.
Across 6 rounds and 426 segments, 32 were blocked and 5 were never reached. Those 37 are the only ones that are unambiguously a failure of service, and they are 8.7% of the work.
71% of complaints do not need a truck
Of 412 complaints a month, 194 are addresses where the bin was never presented and the vehicle passed at collection speed anyway. Answering those costs a lookup. Answering them without a record costs a return visit and an apology for something you did not do.
The remaining 29% genuinely need someone to go back. Knowing which 29% on the morning the complaints arrive, rather than at the end of the month, is most of the operational value on this page.
Bin was not presented
47%The vehicle passed at collection speed and there was nothing at the kerb. Resolved by showing the pass, not by sending a truck.
Collected, resident mistaken about the day
24%A lift is on record for that address. This is a scheduling communication problem rather than an operational one.
Access was blocked
19%Genuinely not collected, and genuinely not the crew's fault. Needs a return visit and a conversation with whoever parked there.
Actually missed
10%The vehicle never entered the street. The only category that should trigger a service credit, and the only one worth measuring the contract against.
Only 41 of 412 — 10% — are a street the vehicle never entered. That is the number a service credit should be calculated on, and it is the number nobody can produce without a segment-level record.
34 → 3
minutes to answer one complaint
The saving lands in the office, not on the round
Answering a complaint today means finding the round sheet, calling the depot, and often sending a vehicle back to be sure. With the segment record it is a lookup. Across 412 complaints a month that is 13,198 of clerical time, before counting the return visits that stop being necessary.
It is a dull benefit and it is the one that shows up first. The contract-defence value — being able to prove 98.8% coverage when a performance review comes round — is larger and arrives later.
What a collection fleet actually uses
The vehicles are slow, the routes never change, and almost nothing on a standard telematics dashboard is relevant. What matters is coverage and evidence.
- The lift, not just the location
- A pass tells you the vehicle was there. The lift event is what turns that into a collection, and it is the difference between the two headline numbers on this page.
- Segment-level coverage
- Rounds are fixed and repeated, so the useful comparison is against the planned segment list rather than against yesterday's distance.
- Photographs from the cab
- A blocked street is an argument unless somebody photographed it. The crew has four seconds to do that and it needs to be one button.
- Reverse manoeuvres
- Collection vehicles reverse constantly in confined streets, and it is where this fleet's serious incidents come from.
- Heavy stop-start wear
- Brakes, hydraulics and clutches on a collection round wear on a schedule that has nothing to do with distance travelled.
- Reports the client will accept
- The output is a monthly document going to somebody who can levy a penalty. It needs to be defensible, not pretty.
What evidence costs you
Being able to prove coverage is not an unmixed good, and it is worth being clear-eyed about that before you propose it to a client.
- A lift sensor is not a bin sensor
- It records that the mechanism cycled, not whose bin it was or whether it was full. For contract measurement that is enough; for billing an individual household it is not.
- Proving coverage invites being measured on it
- A council that can see a 100 per cent figure will write it into the next contract. Evidence cuts both ways, and the operators who benefit are the ones already doing the work.
- Blocked access is a shared problem
- Showing that a street was impassable does not empty the bins on it. The value is in redirecting the argument, not in resolving it — somebody still has to go back.
- Segments are not addresses
- Complaints arrive as a house number and the record is a street segment. Matching the two is a data exercise every deployment has to do, and it is rarely as clean as it sounds.
The honest summary is that this makes a good operator legible and a poor one obvious. If 5 segments out of 426 is a number you would rather your client did not have, the record is not the problem.