Knowing where every skip is, without GPS on the skip

Most skip firms have a skip they cannot account for, and most have had one that sat on a site for six weeks while the customer paid for one. There are three ways to fix it: a tracker on every skip, a number on every skip, or letting the job record do the tracking. We sell the third, and this post is honest about all three.

Why skips go missing

Skips are rarely stolen in the way a van is stolen. They drift. Three stories account for most of it:

• The customer moves it. The builder shifts it round the corner to make room for a delivery, or a neighbour "borrows" it. Your driver turns up to the address on the job and finds an empty drive.
• The collection is forgotten. The customer said "leave it till the job's finished", nobody booked the collection, and the skip sits there unpaid for a month while you hire out a new one.
• The swap is not recorded. On an exchange the driver drops an empty 8 yard and lifts the full one. Nobody notes which skip went where, so your records say skip 14 is in Leeds when it is back in the yard.

All three come down to the same thing: the office does not know what happened at the address. Each fix below closes that gap in a different way.

Option one: a tracker on every skip

A battery GPS tracker is a small sealed box bolted or welded inside the skip, usually under a lip where it will not take a hit from a grab. It reports its position over the mobile network, often once a day while it sits still and more often when it moves, so it lasts years on one set of batteries.

As a guide to cost, two UK suppliers list battery asset trackers at about £150 to £300 with three to twelve months of tracking included, and £162 for the unit plus £39.95 a year for the tracking. Battery life is quoted at three to ten years, depending on how often it reports. Fitting is extra if you do not do it yourself.

So for 100 skips, you are looking at something like £15,000 to £30,000 up front and a few thousand a year after that. Trackers also take a beating: skips are dropped, tipped, burned out and cut up, and a thief who knows where to look will find a tracker and remove it.

When it is worth it: large fleets, high-value containers such as RoRos and compactors, and firms with a real theft problem. For a run of 6 and 8 yard skips that cost a few hundred pounds each, the sums are harder to make work.

Option two: numbered or QR skips

Paint a number on every skip, big enough to read from the cab, and record it on every job: which number went out, which came back. A QR sticker does the same job with a phone scan instead of a pen, though stickers do not last long on a skip.

It costs a tin of paint and a stencil. The catch is that it only works if drivers do it every single time, including the wet Friday afternoon when they are running late. One missed exchange and the number on your sheet is wrong. Numbers are also what makes the third option accurate, so do this whatever else you choose.

Option three: the job is the tracker

A skip does not move on its own. Every time it goes out, swaps or comes back, there is a job behind it: a delivery, an exchange or a collection. If each of those jobs is recorded when it happens, the system can work out where every skip is from the jobs alone. Delivered to 12 Mill Lane (made up) on 2 September, no collection since: the skip is at 12 Mill Lane, and has been for 32 days.

This is what LoadSnap does. Skips are kept as stock, by type and size, with a number for each one if you use them. Every job that delivers, exchanges or collects a skip is worked out into a list of what is out on hire and where, and a map shows each yard and customer site with a picture of what is standing there and how many. On an exchange, the driver's app asks which skip they are collecting and which they are leaving, filled in from the job, with a reminder to check the number on the side.

One thing to know: the job record tells you where a skip was delivered, not where it is this minute. If a customer moves the skip round the corner, the record still says the address it went to. If you need the exact spot at all times, that is what a tracker is for.

Days on hire: the report that pays for itself

Whichever way you track, the report that earns its keep is a simple one: every skip out on hire, the customer, the address, how many days it has been out, and how many days past its booked collection it is.

Run it every Monday. A skip on its third week on a two-week hire is either a collection you forgot to book, or extra days you can charge for. At a typical extra day rate, a handful of forgotten skips a month adds up quickly. Ring the customer, book the collection or invoice the extra days, and the skip is back earning instead of standing.

In LoadSnap that is the Hire report, worked out from the jobs. You can filter it to only the late ones, by customer or by skip size, and download it as a spreadsheet.

Comparing the three

For most skip firms, numbers plus the job record catches the problems that actually cost money: forgotten collections and unrecorded swaps. Trackers earn their place on the containers that are expensive or keep disappearing. Plenty of firms end up using all three.

LoadSnap team

Running a waste business

Written by the team building LoadSnap, the UK waste compliance platform for carriers and receivers.