by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
As gas prices continue to climb, everyone wants to save money at the pump and the JEA is no different.
The utility’s plans to make its fleet of vehicles and equipment more efficient includes GPS tracking.
JEA hosted the top two companies from its pool of potential providers last week for a demonstration of the equipment.
“We hope to have the program up and running by summer or fall,” said Mike Brost, vice president of electric systems for JEA. “It’s a good way to save on fuel, and we need that now more than ever.”
Both Sage-Quest, headquartered in Solon, Ohio, and SkyGuard, headquartered in Flowood, Miss., gave presentations and were allotted two hours and 30 minutes each.
JEA will review the information from the demonstrations and submit a recommendation to the board of directors. Once a contractor has been selected, JEA will begin negotiating the price.
Brost expects the equipment for the fleet and the initial installation to cost about $400,000. The project also will include a recurring charge for Internet communication with each unit.
JEA seeks a system that will help it obtain better data on vehicle usage, conditions and location; manage resources and assign work; and achieve lower costs of operations.
Being able to better coordinate staff and a fleet of 1,200 vehicles and 370 pieces of nonmotorized equipment will help it serve more than 360,000 customers in Jacksonville and parts of three other counties.
JEA also is looking for a system that would be able to record the start of shifts, end of shifts, grouped vehicles, service center/depot revisits, excessive ignition time, driving time, mileage, speed and GPS signal loss.
JEA also wants the system to improve safety for staff.
System requirements include providing actual vehicle operation information. The system will need to communicate with the vehicle computer to retrieve real-time vehicle operation information and maintenance codes.
It also will need to provide a safety alert in the event that emergency services are required and if fleet unit collisions occur.
To ensure the continuous operation of the system, the in-vehicle unit and its associated hardware are required to be tamper-resistant and an alert will be transmitted in the event of tampering.
JEA began to consider installing a system a few years ago, according to Managing Director and CEO Jim Dickenson when asked after the first bid opening was postponed in August.
The bid was delayed because contractors had a lot of questions about the specifications JEA included for the project. JEA pulled the bid, discussed the questions and reopened the bid.
“This is the next evolution of the business,” said Dickenson after the decision to restart the bid process.
“But you have to have a process in place for what you are going to be able to do with the data. You ask for certain bells and whistles in a system and you want to make sure you are going to be able to use them,” he said.
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