West Lindsey cleans up with Toplevel Bulky Waste Management solution

The predominantly rural district of West Lindsey lies immediately north of Lincoln and includes the three market towns of Caistor, Gainsborough and Market Rasen. With a population of 86,500 spread over nearly 450 square miles, the area is among the 20 most sparsely populated in England. For West Lindsey District Council, that creates issues around effectively scheduling the hundred or so bulky waste collections it makes from residents' homes each week.

The introduction of Toplevel's Bulky Waste Management solution has enabled West Lindsey to address these issues, allowing it to reduce the costs of running the service while providing significant improvements to the level of service experienced by residents.

Under the previous system, explains Alex Reeks, Senior Team Leader in Waste Services at the council, when residents called the council's contact centre to book a bulky waste collection, staff would take down the details of what needed to be collected and manually calculate the price to be charged based on a points system for different kinds of items. The contact centre then raised a job ticket which was passed to the waste department, where tickets would stack up until the next collection schedule was put together. "We couldn't give customers a firm collection date at the time they made the booking," Alex points out.

When the schedule was compiled, loads were aggregated simply on the basis of location, with no account given to their volume, weight or the nature of the items to be collected. Collection staff receiving the schedule would then spend time calling customers to confirm it was convenient to pick up the items on the date allocated. "It was inefficient: our refuse collection staff spent half their time trying to confirm the date of collections with customers," Alex says. "And we found it hard to control what resources we were using, and especially how we were allocating vehicles."

West Lindsey turned to Toplevel to provide it with a software solution, based on Toplevel's BookingOffice, that has allowed the council to revolutionise its bulky waste collections.

Now when a customer calls the contact centre and requests a bulky waste collection, the council's Lagan citizen relationship management system automatically pulls up Toplevel BookingOffice. The customer provides their location – determining which of two zones the collection falls into, with collections made in each zone on particular days – and lists the items to be collected. BookingOffice then calculates the total volume in cubic metres, based on average figures from DEFRA, and the customer is offered a firm date for the pickup – or can choose any date up to three months in advance when a suitable slot is available.

BookingOffice also automatically calculates the cost to the customer and allows the council to take the customer's payment, before forwarding all the details of the collection to the Lagan CRM to ensure the CRM holds a complete record of the resident's dealings with the council. The system then creates collection lists for each day, which are exported in XML format to the Civica Public Protection system (formerly known as Flare), used by West Lindsey to support its regulation and enforcement work.

Alex says the BookingOffice bulky waste solution allows West Lindsey to schedule resources more efficiently. "We know which vehicles will be needed on each day, and can make them available for other tasks if they're not needed on a particular day," he explains. "We can also see when additional capacity is required – whether on a one-off basis, such as after the recent floods, or by tracking long-term trends for bulky waste collections – and add extra vehicles." He adds that it now takes just five minutes rather than an hour to generate the collection schedule.

On top of that, because customers can be given a firm collection date, refuse staff no longer have to spend time confirming collections, and the council no longer has to bear the cost of those phone calls. BookingOffice has also eliminated the need to send out staff to quote individually for items not listed under the points system, because a price can be automatically calculated based on the dimensions of the item. Together these changes have allowed West Lindsey to reduce staffing on the bulky waste service by one member of staff.

West Lindsey has also been able to move away from using standard refuse trucks which crushed items and sent them all to landfill. It now uses box vans which allow it to separate out items to be donated to charity or sent for recycling. "That reduces our need for costly landfill, while helping us improve our overall recycling performance, allowing us to hit targets and receive extra funding," Alex explains. "We can use the data captured by BookingOffice to report on the weight and proportion of items recycled, and BookingOffice also provides us with valuable data for councillors when reviewing operating policy such as charges." As part of these changes to the bulky waste service, West Lindsey has moved to a four-day working week for the staff out in the field making collections, allowing the box vans they use to be made available to other parts of the council on the fifth day.

For citizens, the benefits are also clear. They are given a specific collection date when they make the booking, costs are applied more consistently because they are calculated automatically rather than manually, and the whole process of making a booking is much faster. In addition, Alex says, "customers no longer put items outside to sit there for several weeks before we collect them, which improves the appearance of neighbourhoods, and we've cut the average lead time for collections from around 14 or 15 days to just eight."

West Lindsey is now looking at using BookingOffice to support changes in the way its rural road sweeping services operate. Currently, the council sweeps roads on a fixed schedule but is considering a move to using the same capacity to sweep roads "on demand" in response to customer requests made through BookingOffice.