The School District of Osceola County Maintenance Department consists of just over 120 maintenance personnel and provides maintenance to over 52 school sites and numerous ancillary office, transportation and warehouse facilities. The district has over 7,000 employees and in excess of 59,000 students. It is one of the fastest growing Counties in the State of Florida.
With the rising cost of fuel coupled with a determination that excessive miles were being recognized on our maintenance white fleet we chose to reevaluate our delivery method for providing services to our many schools and facilities throughout the district. Many of our vehicles are over 20+ years old and are inefficient to operate. Our mission was to reduce overall fuel consumption through behavior modification and better project planning.
Our director focused attention to the number of miles being traveled from each of the two maintenance areas (east and west). While the areas were basically equal in square footage being maintained, the distance traveled to the facilities was inefficient. We decided to reallocate and realign the zones into three zones to minimize travel distance from each respective maintenance shop.
A GPS system was installed on all vehicles to identify heavy users and to help us determine areas that we needed to improve in. The newly created zones then focused on directing manpower to work orders at the same school or in the vicinity as much as possible to reduce travel time even more.
The challenge we faced was mostly employee resistance. The previous culture had allowed staff to chose what work order they wanted to do and when. This often resulted in a considerable amount of windshield time. It took time to show the amount of savings that could be realized and how this savings would positively benefit them in other ways.
As a result of the efficiency that was created fuel consumption was greatly reduced over a two year period. As we continue to isolate efficiency opportunities we expect to impact this even more. Fuel consumption in 2013-2014 for the white fleet was 74,209.9 gallons as compared to 2014-2015 at 63,802.8 gallons used. This equated to a reduction of 11,407.1 gallons in one year. So far for the 2015-2016 school year we have only used 60,133.6 gallons of fuel bringing the 2 year total gallons of fuel saved to approximately 23,000 gallons. The cost implications of this amount of fuel savings (also factoring lowered fuel cost) is in 2013-2014 we paid $239,624.87 in fuel costs and this year we have paid only $108,481.60 to date. This constitutes a savings of approximately $125,000 this year as compared to two years ago and an estimated overall savings of close to $200,000 over the past two years.
"Aside from our employees being our most valuable resource, time is almost as important in terms of efficiency" Mark Cavinee, Director of Maintenance
Mark Cavinee, Director of Maintenance
Chip Bishop, Assistant to the Director
Shawn Beck, Central Zone Foreman
Don Turocy, West Zone Foreman
Nick Montalbano, East Zone Foreman
JR Blake, Projects Foreman
Leo Galarza, Operations Foreman
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