Tamworth and Lichfield Joint Service

Tamworth Borough and Lichfield District Councils formed a Joint Waste Service in 2010 with a combined fleet of 23 trucks, 72 front line operatives and a small management team, serving a total of 73,000 households.

The ‘Waste Collector’ back-office operations management software and in-cab technology, originally supplied to Tamworth Borough Council in 2005, was extended to cover the new joint waste service. This provided a real-time, paperless solution to optimise vehicle and operative movements across both regions, providing near instant tracking and reporting on waste collection from households and businesses.

Waste Collector was synchronised with the existing CRM system (Lagan), providing instant feedback to the customer call centre to immediately answer any householder queries, such as rejected bin collections. This had a real impact on educating customers on recycling initiatives and the service found that their residents were far happier to work with them if they had an immediate explanation.

Cost benefits and efficiency savings were quickly identified with:

• Savings from a reduction in missed bin calls
• Savings from increased dry recycling, by encouraging residents to segregate waste
• Reduction in customer complaints due to the high levels of service delivery achieved by using Bartec.
• 95% of enquiries dealt with on first contact due to the availability of real time information from the crews

Upgrading to Collective

To assist the service with a digital transformation project in 2017, the Waste Collector system was upgraded to the newer, more powerful, ‘Collective’ system. Collective was tightly integrated with the service’s new self-service e-forms system, Jadu.

One of the first projects was to support Lichfield’s new chargeable garden waste scheme and so automated processes were put in place to streamline the customer garden waste sign-up and renewal process. Working in partnership, Bartec, Jadu and Lichfield DC delivered a modern, fully integrated and automated digital platform.

The Jadu online forms allow users to select the number of bins they wish to subscribe to and request any additional bins to be delivered. This feeds automated processes within Collective, getting rid of hours of administration and allowing customer services to support residents through this transition.

Furthermore, additional automated processes followed allowing customers to book bulky collections, log missed bins and request extra capacity, online with Jobs automatically allocated to crews and any issues immediately flagged to back office staff.

The Results

The solution went live on 15 December 2017, and has enabled the service to:

• Launch a new fully integrated chargeable garden waste service.
• Sign up 22,000 garden waste customers online generating over £1,000,000 in sales
• Signed up 82% of customers online, providing a robust platform for future channel shift.
• Have really good sign-up processes for the new garden waste service supported by highlyautomated back-office functions for bin deliveries, auto-scheduling and missed bin management.

“My sincere thanks to you and your team at Bartec. I think we have got a service we can all be proud of.”

Nigel Harris, General Manager of the Joint Service

A new project is currently underway to implement the Collective Trade module to help manage their growing commercial customer base.