Case Study: Newark & Sherwood District Council: Digital Transformation of a Waste Service
The Meritec team worked closely with the Waste Services team at Newark and Sherwood Council to produce a combination of features on the ESB low code digital platform.
The Challenge
The Waste Services team at Newark and Sherwood District Council were using a variety of manual processes and in-efficient solutions to deliver a number of their key service, including the collection of Bulky Waste items and the delivery of the high-revenue Commercial / Trade Waste service they deliver to local businesses. Collection rounds were printed out daily for the in-cab drivers to follow and the back-office couldn’t receive updates on round process.
The Solution
The Meritec team worked closely with the Waste Services team at Newark and Sherwood Council to fully understand how the entire end-to-end processes of their service delivery worked. A suggested approach that included a combination of features on the ESB low code digital platform was then proposed and accepted. The implementation saw a number of the high-volume transactions within the service fully digitised and included the ESB:Mobile mobility worker mobile app being deployed to all refuse collection vehicles to enable digital access to round and collection sheets. Furthermore, the ability to receive and update work requests “on-the-move” and support for offline working resulted in a much more efficient service delivery across the whole team.
A key part of the project was the training of Council officers to be able to configure the low code element of the digital platform to be able to not only create their own digital workflows, but also amend existing ones. The clear benefit of this agile approach to software configuration was evident when one of the refuse collection vehicles was unexpectedly unavailable and instead of having the contact Meritec (the software supplier) to take that vehicle out of the vehicles that jobs can be assigned to, a member of the Newark & Sherwood team was able to make the change in less than 1 minute.
“Working very closely with Meritec helped us to implement an effective digital workflow to streamline and simplify our Waste Management processes. Introducing ESB has saved us significant time and effort, and we now have a platform to continue to build and improve our services going forward.”
Andrew Kirk, Business Manager – Environmental Services, Newark & Sherwood District Council
Meritec’s View:
Working with a team that had been let down on previous IT projects presented a challenge to the Meritec team to ensure that we could deliver a solution that not only met, but exceeded the customers expectations. It was a real pleasure to work with Andy and his team and see first-hand how our innovative approach and software solutions can deliver real-world benefits to service delivery teams through the implementation of a hybrid digital platform & mobile working solution. We look forward to continuing to work closely with the team to ensure they are getting maximum value from their technology investment.