As transaction volumes climb and waste operations grow more complex, Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery is using connected scale house technology to move vehicles faster, cut manual work, and prepare its facilities for a significant increase in traffic.
For a busy solid waste operation, the scale house sets the pace for everything behind it. Every vehicle crossing the scale brings a transaction with it, and customer information, material type, weight, payment, billing, and reporting all must be captured accurately while the next truck waits its turn. When the window slows down, trucks stack up and the day gets longer for everyone on site.
Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery knows that math well. The company serves Concord, Pittsburg, Oakley, Rio Vista and portions of unincorporated Contra Costa County in Northern California, running approximately 100 collection vehicles and providing residential and commercial waste, recycling and organics service. Its facilities include a transfer station, a materials recovery facility, and three scale houses handling municipal solid waste, organics, and construction and demolition material.
Bill Fraser has spent 23 years with Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery, and for most of that time, keeping those facilities moving has come down to the technology connecting the scale house to the back office. Soft-Pak waste hauler software has been part of that work throughout his career. “It’s been my world for 20 years now,” Fraser said. “And it’s grown with and improved as our company has.”
Speed at the Scale
Ask Fraser what matters most at the scale house and the answer comes quickly. “The first thing is speed. The transactions take almost no time,” he said. “There are no lines when it comes to the scales.”
That speed has consequences well outside the gate. A scale house can process a heavy mix of commercial vehicles, contractors, and members of the public over the course of a day, and small delays at the transaction window multiply as more vehicles arrive. Left alone, the backup eventually reaches the street. “The city doesn’t have to tell us we’re blocking roads because of long lines,” Fraser said.
Fraser notices the difference when he visits operations still running on paper and manual entry. “When you go to other scale houses that are still doing it the old-fashioned way, you see the lines building up.”
Mt. Diablo has kept trimming the transaction itself, most recently by adopting newer payment technology. Soft-Pak integrations now support tap-to-pay, removing another pause at the window. A few seconds saved on a single transaction is easy to overlook, but multiplied across hundreds of transactions a day, those seconds turn into real capacity.
Connecting the Transaction to the Business
For Fraser, the biggest benefit shows up after the truck pulls away. A scale transaction starts or feeds several other processes. Customer records must stay accurate, charges move into billing and accounting systems, work orders and service information need to land against the right customer, and material data gets pulled for reporting and compliance. When those functions live in separate systems, someone has to carry the information from one to the next by hand.
Closing that gap is what Fraser considers the most valuable part of the Soft-Pak system. “With Soft-Pak, it is seamless,” he said. “Transactions, accurate billing, and expedited processes—everything is integrated with our internal software and routed seamlessly.”
Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery uses nearly the entire Soft-Pak ecosystem, so information captured at one point in the operation stays connected as it moves through the business. The result is fewer duplicate entries and fewer chances for an employee to key something in wrong. “Manual processes are too time-consuming and cause issues,” Fraser said. “With Soft-Pak, we eliminate manual errors and can bill accurately and quickly.”
That connection matters in an industry where a single customer relationship generates information across collection operations, disposal facilities, accounting, customer service, and regulatory reporting. At Mt. Diablo, the scale house sits inside that flow rather than off to the side of it, and the transaction that starts at the window keeps moving through the business without anyone reentering it. “It does so many things for a waste hauler,” Fraser said.
Automating More than the Scale Ticket
The same approach has taken administrative work out of processes that used to require plenty of it. Construction and demolition customers working under Green Halo certification are one example. Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery is certified by both Green Halo and the Recycling Certification Institute, and contractors operating under those requirements often need detailed documentation showing where material was delivered and how it was handled. Rather than managing that through a separate manual process, the customer’s certification status is identified within the system, and the associated documentation and reporting are generated through the workflow that already processes the load. The contractor takes fewer steps, and the scale house employee has less paperwork to chase outside the transaction.
It is a narrow example, but it reflects something happening throughout waste and recycling operations. Most automation gains come from removing the small manual steps that repeat hundreds or thousands of times a year, and while each one only saves a little time, together they change how efficiently a facility runs.
Photos courtesy of Environmental Solutions.
A System Built Around the Operation
Two decades on the same core platform has also allowed Mt. Diablo to expand the system as the operation evolved. Soft-Pak now covers functions ranging from scale transactions and billing, to mobile operations and customer service, and Mobile-Pak is integrated with the company’s 3rd Eye technology, extending information into vehicles and field operations.
That integration becomes more valuable as waste companies add technology. A new payment system, mobile application, or reporting requirement can improve one process while creating another island of information that someone must reconcile later, and the operational challenge is making sure each addition works as part of the larger system. Mt. Diablo has worked to pull more of the operation into a single flow and take employees out of the middle of it.
Technology Backed by Support
Fraser also points to a factor that resists measurement and grows more important as technology touches more of an operation. “The support we get from Soft-Pak is unbeatable,” he said. “It’s always a quick turnaround, and they’re there to help you.” Twenty years in, that relationship has become a familiar one. “You can put a face with the name,” Fraser said. “There are no surprises. You build a relationship with them.”
Support carries real operational weight for a company relying on technology to process vehicles, collect revenue, and move information into accounting and billing. A problem at the scale during a busy stretch becomes a facility problem within minutes and reaching someone who understands both the software and the way the business uses it shortens that window considerably.
Preparing for the Next Increase in Volume
Those efficiencies are about to be tested. Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery is preparing to add several new scale houses while expanding its use of unattended and automated operations, and the company has secured a major new contract expected to bring substantially more traffic through its facilities. The challenge that creates is straightforward: process more volume without giving up transaction speed, billing accuracy, or the customer experience at the gate.
Fraser expects the answer to involve more automation and tighter connections between systems. “We want to be first in line on new technologies to optimize the business and processes,” he said.
At the scale house, that means continuing to strip steps out of the transaction while keeping the information it generates connected to the rest of the organization. Faster scale tickets are part of it, along with faster movement through the facility, cleaner billing, less manual handling, and better use of the data the company already collects.
After 20 years with Soft-Pak, Fraser sees that connected approach as settled practice at Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery and as the foundation for how the company intends to grow. Once the new volume arrives, success will look like something customers barely register. They pull in, complete the transaction, and keep moving. | WA
Soft-Pak is a provider of waste hauler software built specifically for the operational and billing demands of the solid waste industry. Soft-Pak supports haulers, transfer stations, materials recovery facilities, and landfills with software that connects scale house transactions to the rest of the business. The Soft-Pak platform covers scale house operations, customer service, routing, billing, and accounting, along with mobile applications that extend information into the field. Scale-Pak manages weight capture, material tracking, payment, and ticketing at the scale, while Mobile-Pak puts route and service information in front of drivers and supervisors. Because those functions share the same customer records, information captured during a transaction stays associated with the correct account as it moves into billing, reporting, and compliance documentation.
Soft-Pak is part of the Environmental Solutions family of companies. Through the Connected Collections ecosystem, Soft-Pak waste hauler software, Heil refuse bodies, 3rd Eye smart camera systems, and Marathon Equipment compactors and recycling equipment work together seamlessly to help fleet owners make better decisions, faster, and achieve the lowest total cost of collection. For more information, visit www.soft-pak.com