WALTHAM, Mass. — Mac-Gray, a national provider of laundry facilities management, has equipped its fleet of 100 machine coin collectors with wireless, GPS location-based capabilities in order to optimize driving routes. In Boston alone, the company estimates fuel savings of 12% due to shorter driving distances.Mac-Gray has also recently introduced LaundryView™ to the multi-housing industry, a technology that allows residents to monitor their wash over the Internet.In addition to reducing gas emissions, Mac-Gray also uses energy-efficient, Energy Star-qualified washing machines at 58,000 laundry facilities nationwide.“Driving in Boston presents unique challenges for our collectors, such as The Big Dig and unintuitive road patterns,” says Mike Lento, vice president of operations for Mac-Gray. “With so many coin collections active in a single month, we wanted to leverage their time and vehicles efficiently. Beyond saving fuel, we are taking an important step in reducing our environmental footprint. We will continue to look to technology to help advance our overall efforts around energy savings.”Mac-Gray collectors are assigned designated locations each month for coin collection from laundry machines and laundry supply dispensers. The company’s previous system relied on assignments via manual route sheets, information written by the collection managers and undesignated driving routes based on the collector’s knowledge of locations and appointment times. That system lead to errors in addresses and directions, which wasted drive time and increased vehicle emissions.
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