WASTE MANAGEMENT
Eliminating waste A
Whilst local authorities scramble to find ways to reduce their budgets without harming frontline services, some have found that finding efficiencies can also unlock ways of better serving their communities through the application of technology, reports Richard Mackillican
sk people what they hold a council accountable for and it is likely
that ‘collecting their bins’ will come pretty high up their list of council responsibilities.
It is therefore easy to see why councils such as Chichester District Council are keen to maintain extremely high standards of waste collection.
The Council has recently invested in a new system which has been fitted to the its 17 refuse vehicles allowing refuse workers to immediately log delays, missing bins, any problems they have encountered and their progress.
A rugged in-cab computer which enables the driver to record incidents is linked to the customer relationship management system used by the Council’s customer service centre.
“We had two drivers in implementing this approach,” says Jane Dodsworth, assistant director of IT and customer service at Chichester District Council.
In terms of
efficiency savings it has saved us about £17,000 in staff time in the back office
48 pse
“The first was that our contract services department was in need of a new back office system because they were operating with a fairly complicated database and we were very reliant on in house skills to support that, which we identified as a business risk.
“Our second was that we wanted to integrate services into our customer service centre and we have a programme to do that. However, we only put services into the customer service centre if it adds value to the customer.
To do this effectively, we ensure that the customer service centre has access to back office information, enabling them to resolve issues at the first point of contact.”
As with any new system, a staged approach was taken to implementation.
“The first stage involved us carrying out a bit of development work with the customer relationship management system to ensure that it fulfilled the needs of our depot as a back office system, such as creating collection rounds, assigning crews to rounds, and assigning bins to properties.”
Secondly, GPS enabled devices were fitted in each vehicle and integrated into the customer relationship management system. The device presents the
Jane Dodsworth
driver with each property on their round as they approach it and offers them the opportunity to record an incident against the property.
Any records made create a case in real time within the customer relationship management system being used by the customer service centre.
“Up until this point the driver had been responsible for manually filling out a form or crib sheet, to record why they had not picked up a particular bin, for example the recycling bin was contaminated.
“Because the crews would return to the depot in the afternoon and most customers would call in the morning, it meant that the officers at the depot wouldn’t know until the crews returned with their crib sheet filled out why bins hadn’t been collected.
This resulted in double-handling of customer enquiries and certainly was not ideal from a customer service perspective.
“Depending on the reason for non-collection, the officers at the depot might then have to send out another crew to go and collect the bins which had been not been collected earlier.
Given that our district is 300 square miles, this could prove to be very expensive and was not conducive to providing good customer service because of the amount of time it could take to despatch a second vehicle.
“The new system provides the location of each vehicle as it progresses on its round so the team can find out where a
Jul/Aug 10
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68