Turn waste collection trucks into powerful incident and fault recording machines

The Spatial Waste Collection and Incident Recording System by Ennoble Consultancy has been developed with the objective of streamlining workflows by the Waste services crew whilst improving the proactive reporting of maintenance and amenity issues. The Waste services crew travels every road within the municipality on a weekly basis collecting either domestic waste or organic products from residential, commercial and industrial properties. As part of the service, operators manually note down any issues of attention, such as derelict vehicles (usually blocking their path), overhanging tree branches, dumped rubbish etc. Additionally, any residence whose waste bin is overfull or has incorrect refuse is also noted. This is a tedious process requiring additional stopping and handwriting and is not practised by all team members. At times, residents call to complain that their bin was not collected. Generally, a truck has to return and collect the bin even though it may not have been put out when the truck originally passed. The application and its processes were created as an instrument to enhance the customer service capability of the waste collection service. The waste team needed a way to validate collections (and hence non collections) so as to enforce the policy with regard to missed (i.e. late) bins. Concurrent with the development of an electronic validation process, there was a significant focus by Council on "amenity" type issues. The aim is being proactive rather than reactive in the identification, reporting and actioning of amenity issues.

The Spatial Waste Collection System was expected to have features staff is able to utilise with minimal training. These include the following;

• Ability of automated and timed recording of collected bins and display of their location
• Ability of recording routine incidents spatially and digitally with minimum of effort
• Provision of a route map so that no services would be overlooked
• Graphical & spatial display of Organic bins to be collected
• Graphical & spatial display of the new subscribers in different colour
• Desktop application to view the daily collections as a monitoring of services and facilitate customer inquiries.