Transport - Case study

Hanningfield travel plan

Reducing CO2 emissions and fuel costs

Work management

Hanningfield travel plan

A green travel plan was developed at Sandon Valley House in Hanningfield aiming to encourage employees to change their behaviour to reduce the environmental impact of their operational travel and travel to and from work. The plan sought to reduce unnecessary travel and shift travel to more sustainable modes or methods, minimizing contributions to climate change, congestion, noise and particulate pollution.

• Lunchtime bus
Sandon Valley House is in a remote location and to prevent multiple car journeys a lunchtime bus service to transport employees to and from Chelmsford town centre was introduced. The facility has been well utilised since May 2008 with 1875 passengers travelling on 599 bus journeys (up to May 2010). Normally the bus service operates 25 journeys per month with an average of 3 passengers per journey. The use of the bus instead of employees taking their own cars will have saved 2444 kg of CO2.

• Car sharing
Hanningfield also utilises a car sharing website (Liftshare), which has 88 employee members. A number of car sharing awareness days have taken place to promote the benefits of car sharing and the website which is a useful tool for those employees considering car sharing. Employees are able to log on to the site and register where they live and can in turn see where other registered employees live in relation to them on a map. The car sharing awareness days aimed to promote this facility to employees and emphasise that targets for car sharing can be small but realistic – i.e. encouraging people to car share even if it is only for one day a month.

• Car park
The car park at our Hanningfield centre has 8 especially designated car parking spaces close to the entrance for those who car share as a further incentive. Additionally, the bike sheds and motorcycle parking are placed close to the entrance to reward those using low carbon modes of transport.

• Walks and catering
To encourage employees to remain on site at lunch time a number of walks ranging from 5 to 30 minutes were developed so employees can get some fresh air before returning to work. In addition to this a café with outside seating and gardens was installed within the new office building to provide employees with access to fresh hot and cold food in a pleasant rural setting.

• Cycle to work
The new office building has also offered the opportunity to encourage cycling to work with bike sheds, showers, lockers, and cycle route maps all part of the provisions available. Employees are able to purchase a bike through our mybenefits ‘cycle2work’ salary sacrifice scheme in partnership with Halfords. Employees opt to pay for their chosen bike over an 18 month period and benefit by saving tax and National Insurance on the amount of the sacrifice.

• Accreditation
The company is currently working Essex County Council Business Travel Plan Team to improve the plan and also improve the benefits that are realised. The site is currently taking part in the County Councils Travel Plan Accreditation process.

The Hanningfield green travel plan is now being reviewed to examine what lessons have been learnt and how the plan can be taken forward into the future.

Reducing CO2 emissions and fuel costs

Monitoring, understanding and changing driving habits is one way of working towards lowering carbon emissions while also reducing fuel costs as it improves efficiency. A project has been carried out to track the level of engine idling on the articulated vehicles that are part of our fleet, primarily sludge road tankers. This has been done by utilising software built into the GPS technology that is available to us.

The GPS systems in the vehicles are, among other things, used to monitor and improve driving performance and to make our drivers more efficient. Engine idling was easy to monitor and was also seen as an area where substantial improvement was needed. The system only recorded idling that lasted longer than two minutes and therefore did not take into account necessary idling (such as stopping at traffic lights).

It was recognised that getting drivers to change their habits would be a significant challenge. Therefore to get drivers involved and encourage them to make the necessary changes while driving a competitive culture was created so that drivers could see how their performance regarding engine idling compared to others.

A weekly graph was produced as a visual tool to show engine idling percentage figures; this helped to create competition between the drivers as they can see who is achieving the most efficient driving.

 

When the project began in September 2009 engine idling was on average around 20-25% of a vehicles utilisation. Since the introduction of the project this figure has steadily fallen to less than 1%, with a slight set back in December to January due to the very cold period experienced last winter

The project resulted in a net reduction in engine idling of 573 hours per month therefore saving 1,266 litres of wasted fuel per month, 1 hour of engine idling equates to 2.21 litres of burnt fuel. This is a total saving of £15,650, a saving of £1,304 in fuel costs per month, and 39,960 kg of CO2 output per annum.

Work management

This programme is our flagship initiative to support the delivery of an even better service to our customers, while operating more efficiently and effectively. In conjunction with BT we have developed a system which uses the latest GPS/GPRS* technology to further improve the management of our field based engineers.

Through knowing the closest employee to an incident, and by providing our office and field based employees with the right information at the right time, customers will be served better, the job completed sooner and the risk of a duplicate visit removed. In one area of the programmes pilot, employee’s mileage reduced by 34%, making a significant contribution to our efforts to respond to the challenges posed by climate change.

During the Work management programme we have so far fitted 355 vehicles with Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) combining satellite navigation and wireless links with the office.

This simple device gives our customers a better service because:

• office employees see immediately where vehicles are and send the nearest one to a job thus reducing response times and mileage.

• data only needs to be entered once, freeing field employees of repetitive administration.

• all business critical data has mandatory fields ensuring key data is always captured and recorded consistently.

• data is entered onto the corporate systems immediately so that both field and office based employees have the most accurate and up to date information available to plan jobs and respond to emergencies.

• information is more accurate and complete, therefore reducing the incidence of jobs being abandoned or suspended due to incorrect or missing job information, improving customer service and supporting our ‘right first time, every time’ culture.

The PDAs are improving the quality of the data which field workers capture about the work they do on our assets. The PDAs are structured so all the business critical data is held as mandatory fields, ensuring the key data is always captured on the job. The vast majority of the data fields also have lists of values to select from, which will ensure information is recorded consistently across the business. The PDAs also capture a series of time stamps about each job which is completed, giving us accurate times for travelling to the job, undertaking the risk assessment and then physically doing the job.

We are now able to collect information about our assets, and the maintenance work that is done on these assets, which is much more complete, consistent and accurate than it has ever been before.

Trevor Jobling is a distribution technician and has worked for NWL for 30 years: “This is one of the best bits of kit I’ve had – apart from a flask! I have been working on creating the front sheets to make sure the essential information is keyed into the PDA. We used to have sheaves of paperwork to fill in, but now it is all done on the PDA, from tracking travel and arrival times, to risk assessment, carrying out the work and time sheets. I found the pilot a huge benefit – we could do more work in a day and it virtually did away with all paperwork. Now I’m looking forward to the next stage of the programme. I’ve seen the new PDA and it’s even better!”

The scheme is being rolled out across NW’s fleet of approximately 1,000 vehicles and 1,100 field operatives.

*Global Positioning Satellite/ General Packet Radio Service.