Enhancing Fleet Fuel Efficiency
Our goal is to maximize vehicle efficiency while ensuring employee safety and maintaining world-class customer service. When determining our fleet needs, we assess employee job responsibilities, vehicle size and fuel efficiency. Whenever possible, Connecticut Water migrates to more fuel-efficient vehicles. The downsizing of our fleet includes moving to subcompact cars for our meter readers, and four hybrid vehicles for employees who travel to all regions of the state.
Video Conferencing to reduce travel among locations
Connecticut Water has multiple offices and operations centers located around the state. Because of this geographic diversity, employees historically had to travel an hour or more to participate in meetings. We are using enhanced technology to provide an alternative to driving.
In September 2009, Connecticut Water established a video conference link between offices, in response to employees' desire to minimize travel time and expense between our locations. The use of video conferencing has increased the productivity of our people and is a cost effective and energy efficient way to allow employee teams to communicate and share presentations.
We have developed a method to log data on the travel avoided as a result of the system, which is translated into company-wide numbers for savings in labor hours, gallons of gasoline, and pounds of carbon dioxide.