A quarterly newsletter for clients and friends of Chenault Systems
Over the last two years, Chenault Systems has been involved in developing "soil tracking" systems for Laidlaw Waste Systems, Inc. at their Richland Hills, Texas location. The right kind of information can be a valuable thing; especially if it points out that less soil was needed in land fill operations, saving millions of dollars over a year and a half. Good things happen to organizations and directors who make the effort to look at detailed information in more ways than one.
David Hildreth, Director of Landfill Operations for Laidlaw, understood that soil tracking is a practice that could mean large savings. The key was to identify if a site is using up too much space for soil cover. Air space, normally used for waste, could be consumed by excess dirt. Minimizing the amount of soil (dirt) used leaves more space available for solid waste placement, thus increasing cash flow over the site's life. Also, minimizing the amount of dirt used adds economic life to the site.
The major capital investment in the site is made up of purchase price, cell development, and other capital improvements. These capital items are depleted over the remaining life of the site. Whether a site's life is measured by years or cubic yards of capacity, it is still increased by minimizing the quantity of soil used, thus increasing the "payspace."
Environmental laws require a maintenance fund be created for "closure" and "post closure" of a site. The amount for this fund is an estimate of what these aspects will cost and are based on the capacity of the site. If the total quantity of waste coming in can be increased over the site's life and it fills the same volume of total space, the rate of funds accrual is less.
Millions of dollars worth of work that is planned in the future is delayed to a later date because the payspace lasts longer (because volume used by soil is reduced). This also allows the equipment that hauls the dirt to work less because alternative methods of daily cover are used. When equipment works less, costs are reduced for fuel, repair and labor.
Due to the foresight of Laidlaw management, with the aid of an Excel® database (currently proposed to be converted to FoxPro®) developed by Chenault Systems, dirt usage was reduced by 42% over 18 months. This amounts to 20 million cubic yards of air space saved; and at $6 per cubic yard, this has saved the operation $120 million. A broad rule of 20% excess dirt was reduced to 15%. Machine usage decreased by 21%. The volume of revenue producing waste in the land sites increased by 11%. Laidlaw was able to reduce the earth moving fleet size by 34 pieces in just one year. This also enabled Laidlaw to lengthen the depreciable age of equipment and push back the purchase of new equipment, which impacts the time value of money. All this occurred because of improvements based on data collected and reported by a desktop database application for soil tracking.
With the rapid growth the Internet, a new form of application has emerged called the Intranet. Intranets are Web applications that are internal to organizations. These applications employ Internet technologies such as Web servers, Web browsers, standard TCP/IP network standards, and fast development tools such as HTML and CGI programming. Like the Internet, Intranet applications provide information and services to a number of users: in this case, the company employees.
An Intranet is not defined by any geographical or physical boundaries -- Intranets can be global -- but boundaries are defined by those who have access to the information. Intranets have experienced an explosion in growth over the past year because these applications allow for more efficient, more effective, more accurate communications and availability of information that contributes to more employee productivity. Organizations that are spread out geographically can use an Intranet to centralize information without increasing bureaucracy. In other words, any employee with the proper authorization, can go to a single Web browser to obtain information anywhere in the company, regardless of physical location. For example, a restaurant company may have its corporate headquarters in Dallas, food testing facilities in another part of the state, and regional offices and stores all over North America. A manager at any location could have immediate access to information for any site without having to wait until the next morning for some overnight "polling" system. Expenses associated with printing, copying, faxing, paper, long distance telephone (voice or modem), and mail room distributing can be cut dramatically. Of course, every site would have its own Web page.
Since Internet technologies have come about, Intranets have expanded throughout organizations. Using Internet technologies, Intranets have enabled companies to fundamentally change the way many traditional business processes are conducted. For example, over the past two years, Intranets have taken a large share of business from common groupware vendors, especially Lotus Notes of IBM. (Lotus Notes is an information manager designed to enable a group of people to share information -- documents not records -- across computer networks, even if those people are in different parts of the world; it is not a true relational database.) Intranets can better accomplish the same thing, at a smaller cost.
The cost cutting reasons for using an Intranet over groupware are:
The Intranet trend may not be right for all companies, but the Intranet concept needs to be explored, not ignored by upper management. Like the local area network in the late 1980's, this technology may not be well accepted by traditional thinkers in the beginning; however, most companies will be using this technology by the year 2000 to cut costs and make themselves more competitive.
It usually pays big dividends to keep up with these new methods. Also, it is easy to fall behind the technical times. Consultants, who have a wide view of what is going on in various areas because of their broad experiences with various companies can be the key to staying current with the times.
Corporate Poem:
They threw a party to send him off,
With gifts and recognition.
But soon they had to fend him off-
He became the competition!
--Pat D'Amico
Quote Worth Noting
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
Excel® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation
FoxPro® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation
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