ISB Global's Waste & Recycling One - 'All Hail the Work Order'

Waste & Recycling One - 'All Hail' the Work Order - Key to Creating and Managing Instructions to Perform and Report on a Job.

Waste management and recycling is a hugely complex business to be in. Even the most ‘simple’ waste and recycling operation can involve hundreds of tasks and processes, all of which have to be kept track of and reported on. That’s why it’s crucial that the technology behind it all provides true integration – where every process links, is updated automatically, data flows seamlessly throughout, reports are generated automatically and engineered to fully integrate with ERPs like SAP.

So, when it comes to providing Waste & Recycling One, (WR1), a software solution that standardises, integrates AND automates all the processes and tasks involved in a waste and recycling business, it can be hard to understand how it’s possible to make this happen.

Hayden Nothnagel, ISB Global’s Chief Solutions Officer, gave us some of the detail behind the Waste & Recycling One solution.

So, Hayden, where do you start when it comes to Waste and Recycling business processes?

“First, it’s important to understand all the different business areas. While each waste management and recycling business has its own set up and operational focus, roughly speaking they all have these four areas which will interact with the WR1 Work Order:

1.????Buyers / Sellers e.g. clients buying and selling their services and / or companies buying and selling the material from them

2.????Hauling / Transport e.g. physically moving material, from collecting it to transporting it back to the depot, to transporting it to the next destination once it has been sorted for recycling and reprocessing

3.????Scales / Depot e.g. the crucial weighbridges that let you know what has come in or gone out and when, and then once the material has been processed what is going back out and when

4.????Finance e.g. managing accruals, ensuring the charges, costs, fees, taxes etc. are correct and ultimately guaranteeing the right money is being paid out at the right time to the right companies and getting the money in.

Next, we start to get into the detail of each. Understanding the detail is crucial, as there is so much of it. Once you understand the detail of how to run a Waste and Recycling operation, you can see why it’s hard to integrate all the processes involved.

Why is it hard to integrate everything?

“Because they’re all interrelated. One links to many others. If you don’t join them up properly, it has a huge negative impact.

Let me share a basic example about one small aspect:

You normally collect waste from the local school. It’s holiday time so they want to pause this for 6 weeks. That ‘knowledge’ needs to be in the system. But school holiday dates can vary by a few days. So, they might phone in. Once that change has been made, the drivers need to know so they don’t go to the school. Finance, using SAP, needs to know so the school’s bill is reduced. Then when the school starts up and needs waste collection again, the drivers need to know, and Finance need to know.

This involves multiple processes and tasks. They might be held in different software applications and systems. Some of these processes might still be manual e.g. on a spreadsheet.

If the processes and tasks aren’t held in one integrated software application, problems can happen. Such as changes made in one place aren’t made in automatically made in another, so people can be working from out of date information.

Waste and Recycling One is software has been designed to overcome all these issues and provide an automated and integrated Work Order linked to SAP.”

So, how does it provide this crucial integration?

“The Work Order. In Waste & Recycling One, the Work Order is key.”

What is a Work Order in Waste & Recycling One?

“At a basic level, the Work Order is an instruction to go and collect or deliver a determined material type from a particular customer/supplier at a defined time and day, either using your own transport or subcontractor vehicle, then take that specific type of material to a certified place to be recycled, processed or disposed of.

There are also additional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) controlled in the Work Order and integrated to other mechanisms in the process e.g. did we collect the material within the timescale agreed in the SLA with the client?

This means that the Work Order contains a huge amount of information, which is linked to other sources of information and control. These include pricing for charging, payments for suppliers, routes, contracts and forecasts.

Once it has been compiled, using all these different sources of data, the Work Order is the control instruction that allows for automated planning because you can group Work Orders together for example, to form a Route.

This results in a tightly controlled process from an initial Enquiry to a Quote through a Contract to a live Work Order with correct data from one source - no more things being forgotten or working from old information or inputting manually or from several different software applications. The Work Order holds it all and is up to date.

It sounds like a comprehensive way to bring all your data together to really work well?

It is. A good way to think about the Work Order is to imagine your organisation as a conveyor belt.

As the Work Order moves along the ‘conveyor belt’ each business ‘area’ contributes to it.

But, instead of it being siloed in separate software applications and fixed, ALL the departments can be contributing to and viewing the Work Order at the same time.

This is huge.

For example:

• Transport can see the Work Order being completed on the vehicle.
• Drivers and teams can interact with the Work Order on their device, raising a problem, such as a locked gate at a collection point, taking a photo, or confirm when it has been collected by onboard weighing.
• If there’s a problem with the collection, then Customer Services are automatically notified. They can rectify the problem using information from the Work Order. Interactions with the customer are queued and logged in sequence and if necessary, penalty charges can be applied automatically.
• As the Work Orders are scheduled to arrive at recycling or destination point at a specified day and time, the weighbridge knows exactly what Work Orders are arriving at the depot. The site can plan for the amount of materials on any given day or time to be recycled, aiding with capacity planning, recycling and reporting at the depot. Mass balancing input and output of materials.
• Once the Work Order has been completed at the Weighbridge, the Work Order then splits into a payment information and charging information, as pricing has been held from a central repository. This can be altered through penalty or additional charges and the differences to planned vs actual weight or materials quality for example, captured at the weighbridge.
• As Waste & Recycling One is integrated to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) the payments and charges are readily available as soon as processed so that Finance can run accounting transactions on and according to their desired accounting cycles.

So, when the Work Order is properly integrated across all systems, it really helps the business be more efficient?

Yes. Because Waste & Recycling One is one integrated system, it means when one thing changes, everyone can see it immediately and it is updated in all parts of the system.

The Work Order is at the heart of providing a truly integrated, simplified and automated software solution for waste management and recycling businesses.

So, if the Work Order is so crucial, why isn’t this approach standard across the sector?

Because it’s really complicated to build and set up.

Some applications do have a Work Order type of system. However, our technology allows that Work Order to be published and interacted with across many different applications and devices.

Importantly, it has been engineered to integrate with SAP or other ERP Vendors. This means that data matches throughout the one integrated system.

To put it simply, you have an automated, integrated process from beginning to end in operations and with the result of correct accounting transactions.

You’re ensuring operational transactions are correct before they get to accounts. This allows Finance teams to get on with their tasks rather than track mistakes from different software applications used before an order gets to accounts. This speeds up purchasing and sales invoicing and gives a far more accurate and real time position of the business, which ultimately leads to improved cashflow.?

This is important as generally separate waste recycling operational software applications have not been engineered to integrate with specific ERPs.?

How do you provide a solution like this for our Waste and Recycling clients?

It’s important to understand that every single waste management and recycling business is different. They operate in different areas of waste (or commodity trading). Some are brokers. Some may collect. Some may process. Some focus on one material. Some on all materials.

Then, they all have different processes and ways of doing things. They might have a bit of software for Finance, another for Hauling, one for Weighbridge. Next, add in the human ‘bits’ such as, ‘Tom in Finance found the Accruals not really working in the system so he manages that on a Spreadsheet’ and it gets more tricky.

So, we start by really understanding what’s going on in each of our client’s businesses. While we have over 17 years of experience in meeting the needs of waste and recycling businesses around the world and perfecting our Waste and Recycling One Solution, we always spend lots of time with each new client mapping out the processes for their specific business.

We have to make sure that all their pieces of software, spreadsheets, manual processes and everything else are identified, captured. We then set up Waste and Recycling One for them knowing that what feeds into each of their Work Orders is correct.

Does Waste and Recycling One really have the flexibility to adapt to each business?

Yes. While Waste & Recycling One is ‘preconfigured’ so it meets the needs of most waste and recycling operations and covers most business processes, we can also develop ERP, and the WR1 Core and Extension modules. We do this using the low code platform, OutSystems. This allows for some serious innovations completely designed to meet the individual needs of each client. It's exciting and great to know that what we provide the clients with is what they actually need in their business.”

Hayden, thank you for your time.

Hayden normally explains all this in a two-hour presentation with questions, so we haven’t covered everything here! If you’d like to know more then get in touch: [email protected]

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