Rising fuel prices are adding pressure for irrigation contractors who are already balancing labor shortages, equipment costs and customer expectations.
“Outside of labor, fuel is our second-highest cost,” said Jason Cooper, the irrigation manager for GreenView Partners, a North Carolina-based company.
Instead of passing costs directly to customers through fuel surcharges, many contractors are tightening scheduling, rethinking routing strategies, stocking trucks more strategically and using remote technology to reduce unnecessary trips.
Tighter scheduling rather than fuel surcharges
In some industries, business owners are already adding fuel surcharges to deliveries. However, irrigation contractors remember the backlash from previous fuel surcharge attempts and are finding other ways to preserve margins.
“We talked about adding a fuel surcharge, but the last time we put one out there, people were having a fit,” said Scott Todd, owner of Innovative Irrigation Solutions in Rochester, New York.
Instead of adding fees, he has shifted the company’s focus toward tighter geographic scheduling and reducing unnecessary driving time. And if a crew finishes their route before the days end, Todd sends them home. Paying full wages for fewer hours is more cost effective than filling the truck, he said.
GreenView Partners has also prioritized using remote tracking data to identify operational inefficiencies and tighten internal cost controls.
“We are tightening expectations for our crews, limiting stops along the way to jobs and reducing truck idling time, which has been the biggest impact on fuel use,” Cooper said.
About six years ago, Tony Zucco, general manager of Thomas Landscape in Webster, New York, also began closely monitoring routing and installed GPS units and front and rear cameras on every truck. The data has enabled strategic routing to reduce waste, with an added benefit. Collectively, these strategies have allowed them to hold off on fuel surcharges and saved on expenses in unexpected ways.
“We’ve had several incidents on the road, and the GPS has been really important,” he said. “In one case, a garbage truck hit us. The cameras were able to show that the garbage truck clipped the back of our trailer, and we were able to get out of the insurance claim.”
Danny Smith, the director of technical operations at Park West Inc. said during a recent leadership meeting, the team carefully evaluated rising operating costs and what could realistically be passed on to customers without damaging relationships or professionalism.
“We looked at a fuel surcharge but instead increased our billable technician rate by $2.50 per hour,” he said. “We sent a message to over 600 properties in California and Nevada explaining why, sharing some math, and that if fuel comes down, we would reduce the hourly rate. We’re still taking a loss, but it was able to cover enough that we didn’t have to go after maintenance contract increases or other means to capture more revenue to combat the cost.”
Strategic parts stocking
For many contractors, reducing fuel use is not limited to customer-related routing. Inventory management and truck organization are also becoming part of the efficiency conversation. Fully stocking vans has become a priority to minimize mid-day trips for parts.
“All the vans are fully stocked, so it’s very rare that they have to come back for parts, and if they do, it’s a specialty part,” Todd said.
Cooper is fortunate that a distributor built its new location across the street from the company’s Raleigh, North Carolina, location. Crews can walk across the street to pick up parts, but the company’s Charlotte and Wilmington locations still require long drives for supplies.
“For our branches other than Raleigh, we changed to ordering every two weeks, so we don’t hold onto inventory at the end of every month,” Cooper said. “I PO every job so that can be a downside if we get to the end of the month and a job gets moved to June; it creates extra paperwork.”
Smith said Park West avoids overstocking technician service trucks while ensuring crews have the parts they need in the field. Recently, the company did a truck blowout across all 100 trucks. Technicians and helpers removed everything from their trucks, cleaned them and identify unnecessary duplicate parts to reduce weight.
“We were trying to get material off our trucks to gain fuel efficiency,” he said. “If you do the math, even one mile per gallon difference across that many trucks and miles adds up.”
During spring startups, especially on large commercial sites, Zucco has focused on making sure trucks are stocked with supplies to fix most repairs in one visit. He also sends two crews to site walkthroughs: one to start the controller and check each zone, and another to make repairs so crews can leave the site with the work completed unless they uncover a major issue requiring a follow-up trip.
Remote monitoring to reduce trips
Remote monitoring is also helping some contractors reduce unnecessary service trips, although customer adoption still varies by market.
Cooper said he wishes there were more traction in the North Carolina market for remote monitoring, not only to reduce service calls, but also to gain access to more operational data.
Todd and Zucco are encouraging Wi-Fi-enabled controllers on all new installs, and customers are embracing the idea. Right now, they aren’t necessarily charging for the service, but when a customer calls with an issue, they try to troubleshoot the issue remotely before dispatching a technician.
Park West is taking a different approach to managing emergencies. The commercial-only company does not allow customers to run their systems on Friday evenings, Saturday mornings or nights.
“We don’t want our guys woken up at 2 a.m., and we do not want people on the road that late at night,” Smith said. “By shifting irrigation into normal workdays, we’ve almost eliminated all of our emergency calls over the weekends and get our guys off the roads when it’s really not safe to do so.”
