Waste Management Case Study

Powys County Council use ROCC Waste Management software

Local authorities are fighting fires on many fronts to deliver value for money services in the teeth of tighter regulations and controls from both central government and the European Commission. And they are actively moving towards the reality of e-government, perhaps nowhere more urgently than in rurally-focused councils.

Everything from energy efficient housing stock and carbon reduction programmes to congestion charges, parking, transport policies and care are under ever-greater scrutiny.

But in towns halls across Britain, it seems the most pressing issue on the lips of executive officers and councillors alike is rubbish – how to collect and dispose of it, how we can produce less and recycle more and at what price.
The double whammy of EU landfill targets and the former Chancellor Gordon Brown’s tax hikes, coupled with dwindling acreages devoted to disposal, have focused attention on cost-effective, sustainable solutions to what is the outfall from consumerism.

Waste strategy
Powys County Council and its longstanding strategic IT partner ROCC have been studying ways to bring new efficiencies into the waste management process throughout what is a geographically extensive and rural region.

Covering 2,000 square miles, a quarter of Wales, its population conversely is sparse, just over 126,000, accounting for a mere 4% of the Principality’s total.
The council’s estate is extensive though – 600 public buildings and 5,000 houses come under Powys County Council’s control.

David Bradley, the council’s Construction Procurement and Premises Manager, has been helping to take forward the council’s commitment to e-government for some years, overseeing a transformation of the management and operational function of the building services and planned maintenance departments.

Working closely with ROCC, Bradley has applied Uniclass modular business support software to a range of office and field-based services that embraces elements from initial call-logging by customer services to live interfacing with PDAs that staff carry with them throughout the extensive county. “ROCC don’t stand still, they move forward and that’s what we want from a strategic partner. We generate ideas ourselves but need companies that can help us put those ideas into practice for us” explains Bradley.

The success of the application in the building services and planned maintenance departments prompted project heads such as Bradley to consider ways of further developing the software for the highly specialised and complex spheres of refuse collection and waste management. So the council began studying a system covering appointments, rounds, lists, collections and document management.

Powys then replaced the Classic, UNIX, system with the new version of Oracle. “We did that for two reasons,” explains System Administrator John Jones. “First, it future-proofed us and second it dramatically improved the ability of the SQL side [refuse] to communicate with the financial back office – allowing them to speak to one another. The benefit was to link financial transactions dynamically.”

The rural challenge
“Powys is one of the largest counties in England and Wales,” Bradley notes, “but population per square mile is far fewer than the average. To travel across the county can take several hours by car and there are no motorways.”

Winding country roads and mountain ranges fail to deter Powys council from providing waste collection and recycling services to households and businesses across a quarter of Wales but time management issues and access are of course key elements of developing an IT system that optimises the working day for both office-based and field staff. Because, as Bradley states: “Operatives typically can be working 40 to 50 miles from base.” Waste has also become a political hot potato of late and councils are under the cosh to meet government set recycling and landfill targets. The price to pay if they do not is hefty.

In an authority the size of Powys, this function of council service delivery presents challenges, but developing an automated system, one that links in with a bespoke waste contact centre, would bring major benefits for customers and council alike. We used to run a centre to log calls concerning waste but our problem was that in Powys, refuse was not automated – the system was round-based and in rural areas notes were kept manually on where a bin is located for example. With the new system notes can be electronically stored and brought up at the touch of a button.
The system developed by ROCC using Microsoft’s .NET framework meets these challenges by connecting office and mobile workers through an intuitive browser interface, sharing a database of properties, rounds, jobs, assets and contracts.

Contact centre
Heidi Lewis, Customer Liaison Manager in the Refuse and Waste Management department, accesses calls logged on the system by the front-end helpdesk. “We then allocate the query to the relevant regional office and it is processed,” Lewis explains.

The front end helpdesk is run by claims and helpdesk officer Grace Hodges and her five-strong team work from 8.30am to 5pm Monday to Friday logging calls. “The front-end system guides you through and encourages you to ask the right questions and also gives each job a priority level for actioning. There’s less risk of error now.

“We are an experienced and knowledgeable group of staff,” states Hodges, “the software allows the team to log then monitor jobs on the system and allocate appointments. The waste manager knows that I have created the job and they can view the status history online. We all have a user ID too, so they can come back to me if they need to.”

“In terms of assigning jobs, the system allows us to see which waste manager is responsible for the region in question (they have six covering the county) and records their phone number” says Hodges.

Streamlining waste management
The Uniclass Waste Management (UWM) software also assumes responsibility for prioritising jobs. It automatically gives a priority for the job by selecting the right criteria, whether this is an emergency (within four hours or within 24 hours), then between one and seven days, two to 24 days or within a month.

Also logged on the system will be a history of previous jobs. “We find out who did the job originally, whether a waste manager issued an order on it and whether the client gave us an order number for it,” states Hodges.
The sequence of five notice windows that the software serves up for helpdesk staff allows them to log fault descriptions, ending with a free text facility for adding more information if necessary such as, in the case of property, who the keyholder is and how staff can gain access. “We can see exactly what the job number, priority and status is. The system is helpdesk-friendly that way,” says Hodges.

Invoices for waste services such as bulk collections are raised by the ‘back-office’ software and issued to clients – further reinforcing Powys’ commitment to e-government. “It’s all part of an e-financial central package,” Thomas adds.

Moving forward The department plans to develop more precise data on waste collections and recycling as part of the move by them to run an IT system that “can do everything”. Close links with partners such as ROCC are important to a fully functioning network, states Hodges. “Two members of staff in our IT section deal with ROCC direct, which helps us communicate faster and aids troubleshooting.”

Other moves involve kitting out operatives with PDAs to log data and update the system remotely. “Introducing PDA’s will bring huge gains in time management,” Hodges is quick to point out, “not only because of the geographical scale of Powys but also because the PDAs will allow operatives to log exactly where residents’ bins may be located.”

Other rurally-based local authorities are eagerly viewing developments in Powys and the expectation is that some may well move along similar lines.
“We are reasonably ahead with e-government,” Bradley says. The partnership with ROCC and the focus on “constant development” is working well, he acknowledges. “We’ve built on ROCC’s expertise, now we’re moving on again with a constant vision of improving on paper systems - grabbing at the technology and evolving it.”

Successful launch
The Uniclass Waste Management (UWM) system was officially rolled out to wide acclaim in February at a conference in Stratford-upon-Avon that attracted authorities from across Britain who heard how the management software is helping the refuse and street cleansing departments in Powys meet the challenge of delivering frontline services to such a widespread rural community.

At Wealden District Council too, UWM is integral to an innovative programme of self-set objectives including integrated waste collection and a partnership approach to service delivery throughout the largest district in East Sussex and one that has achieved `Beacon’ status for sustainable development.