Fleet Management: Mac-Gray Green Business Practices Save Fuel And Reduce Emissions

Fleet Management: Mac-Gray `Green’ Business Practices Save Fuel And Reduce Emissions

Vettro, one of the global leader in mobile on-demand business applications, recently announced energy and cost saving results from its second successful technology project with Mac-Gray, the provider of laundry facilities management services. For the past year, Mac-Gray has equipped its fleet of 100 machine coin collectors with wireless GPS location-based capabilities powered by Vettro’s field service mobile application to dispatch jobs and optimize driving routes. In Boston alone, the company estimates fuel savings of 12 percent due to shorter driving distances. The cutting of gas emissions, coupled with Mac-Gray’s use of energy efficient ENERGY STAR qualified washing machines at 58,000 laundry facilities nationwide, demonstrates the industry leader’s commitment to environmental responsibility.

“Driving in Boston presents unique challenges for our collectors, such as The Big Dig and unintuitive road patterns. With so many coin collectors active in a single month, we wanted to leverage their time and vehicles efficiently,” said Mike Lento, vice president of operations for Mac-Gray. “Vettro has completely transformed the dispatch of jobs based on location of the collector to optimize driving routes. Beyond saving fuel, we are taking an important step in reducing our environmental footprint. We will continue to look to technology to help advance our overall efforts around energy saving.”

Mac-Gray collectors are assigned designated locations each month for coin collection from laundry machines and laundry supply dispensers. Mac-Gray’s previous system relied on assignments via manual route sheets, information written by the collection managers, and undesignated driving routes based on the collector’s knowledge of locations and appointment times. The manual system led to errors in addresses and directions, which wasted drive time and increased vehicle emissions. Mac-Gray worked with Vettro to create CollectorLinx, a dispatch system built on Vettro 360 for Service & Repair that leverages GPS-enabled Motorola i355 mobile devices to minimize Boston drive routes.

CollectorLinx is the second phase of Mac-Gray’s efforts to bring efficiency through mobility for its field workers. Working with Vettro, Mac-Gray initially deployed mobile CRM applications on smartphones for its field service workers that maintain the company’s laundry facilities in hotels, universities and laundromats throughout the U.S. Vettro 360 was integrated with Solomon CRM to eliminate manual dispatch at all of its 24 service centers, staffed with 250 field technicians. Since this deployment, Mac-Gray has measured a 20% increase in technician capacity, and more than a 70% drop in time to resolution per ticket.

“Mac-Gray has been at the forefront of corporate environmental responsibility long before it became a popular issue. We are extremely pleased that in addition to contributing to their ‘Green’ efforts, this additional deployment enables Mac-Gray to improve speed of collections, reduce dispatch costs by half, and reinvest in revenue-generating staff,” said Joe Rymsza, president and CEO, Vettro. “Mac-Gray is a terrific example of how eco-friendly technology can boost the corporate bottom line and create positive community impact.”

The Vettro 360 suite of applications serves the mobile computing needs of field service, IT helpdesk, pickup and delivery, and sales professionals through a single, standards based mobile architecture. The Vettro 360 core architecture integrates with multiple enterprise systems to allow enterprises to share field operations visibility, deploy multiple mobile applications easily, and support critical decision-making processes with always up-to-date information. All Vettro 360 applications boast plug-and-play with advanced mobile capabilities such as GPS, Bluetooth peripherals, RFID, point-of-service transactions, and printing to optimize performance of the mobile enterprise.

About Mac-Gray
Mac-Gray is America’s premier laundry facilities contractor and a provider of other amenities and products to colleges, universities and the multifamily housing industry. We provide commercial laundry equipment, domestic washers and dryers and a full line of Maytag kitchen appliances. Our programs are proven to increase revenues and resident satisfaction with dramatic savings on water, sewer, gas and electricity costs. Mac-Gray recently introduced LaundryViewTM to the multi-housing industry, a technology that allows residents to monitor their wash over the Internet.

About Vettro
Vettro is the preferred mobile application provider of Global 2000 businesses. Geared to the execution-oriented needs of today’s mobile worker, the award winning Vettro 360 suite of applications make it easy for workers to do a better job faster, wherever they are. Backed by premier carrier, device, and Independent Software Vendor partners, Vettro’s suite of mobile applications keeps field service, IT helpdesk, pickup and delivery, and sales workers stay productive at close to 300 leading enterprises including Bell Mobility, BostonCoach, Carillion, Carey Limousines, Cigna, Clemson University, Cytyc, General Electric, Honeywell, Mac-Gray, Merrill Lynch, SuperShuttle, and YRC Worldwide. For more information, visit www.vettro.com.