Polygon Reduces Carbon Footprint Whilst Saving Time and Money with RIT Plan in Belgium

Polygon in Belgium found themselves encountering a problem with technicians driving longer distances than needed, which led to lost driving time, high fuel costs and ultimately, pollution of the environment.

“It also created frustrated technicians, so we realized we had to change our way of working,” says Carla Slaets Country president of Polygon Belgium.

With the tool, Rit Plan, Belgium went from manual planning with no structure, only visiting a maximum of three jobs a day, no efficiency and frustrated employees to a smoother way of working, resulting in happy employees and a better environment.

Planning is done via a schedule board in the business system, and when the daily schedule is full;, the data is extracted from the business system into the route planning programme. The programme then calculates the most efficient routes, starting from the home address of the technicians.

Polygon Belgium has approximately 50 leak detection jobs per day. Instead of previously giving three different arrival times to the customer, they now give one time block with an arrival time of between 8am and 2pm, which has enabled the team to take on one more jobs per day.

“All technicians have three scheduled appointments per day. But once they have completed them, they can go to one more visit,” says Carla Slaets.

Polygon initiated a short pilot period in November 2019 which showed such a good result that they rolled out the full version in December 2019. At the end of 2020, Polygon Belgium will evaluate the entire year. But, so far, it has resulted in a saving of 8.2 tonnes of CO₂. The average mileage has gone down by 11.2% and the average fuel cost has decreased by 10.4%. Added to this, Polygon Belgium has received very positive feedback from the technicians who have reported that they have a much better work life balance as a result.