If you say that managing a waste management business is difficult, anyone would agree with you. Indeed it is difficult, but with the right kind of tool and technology, this difficulty can be subdued. This blog speaks about how you can make your waste management business more manageable, especially the field operations, and achieve operational efficiency. First and foremost, it is important to understand why it is difficult to manage a waste management business. Understanding the underlying loopholes will also pinpoint the factors responsible for the poor operational efficiency in the overall system. Needless to say that in most cases, the aspects of a business that are not being managed efficiently are the real low-performing aspects of that business.
Why is it difficult to manage a waste management business?
It is difficult to manage a waste management business because most of its operations are field-based, which means these are carried out at dispersed locations by a dispersed mobile workforce. In a business that operates under a closed office premise or through a well-structured network connecting the remote offices, the operations, and its related communication, reporting, supervisory interventions, everything happens on a more real-time basis, while in the case of field-based operations there is a gap, a delay in the timeline.
So, the real challenge is to make the process of managing field operations a more real-time affair. The key hindrances that fuel up the challenge of poor management are:
- Lack of real-time visibility into the field activities of the workforce
- lack of real-time reporting structure,
- communication gaps,
- Remote working locations
- Mobility needs of the field workforce, such as access to information, access to self-services, team collaboration, etc.
- Lack of facilities for real-time data collaboration
- Poor reporting structure, etc.
All these hindrances cause a kind of delay in the overall workflow, the outcome is low operational efficiency, such as:
- Projects don’t get wind-up within the esteemed timeframe, deadlines get stretched
- Resources and workforce get blocked for project
- The scope to take up new revenue opportunities gets killed
- Overhead costs increases
- Clients get offended
- Brand value demeans
How waste management software is the solution for poor operational efficiency in waste management field services?
Automation is the need of the hour; it is the technology that can address all the challenges, problems, and hindrances mentioned above. By incorporating automation in your field operations, you can instantly make the processes more streamlined, well connected, and manage them more efficiently from any remote location. Now, don’t feed the idea that you need to make heavy investments or put in massive time and workforce into action to build the IT infrastructure for executing automation. Ready-to-use waste management software suites are there that can easily automate your field operations.
These are easy to learn and operate software programs, and the best thing is that these are mobile. A mobile waste management software is responsive to almost all types of smart devices like smartphones, laptops, notebooks, and desktops, and hence can be operated from any device of your choice.
What are the automation capacities of waste management software?
It brings your entire process of field service management over the online platform and provides you real-time visibility into what is happening where or who is engaged with what job.
- From a remote location, you can track the field locations of your employees, drivers, the fleet in transit, etc.
- You can time-stamp the activities of your employees, know when they have checked in for a job when they are traveling, by which route, and when they have checked out of a job.
- The software can automate job scheduling, and help you with skill-based job allocation. It tracks the availability of a worker, assesses his skill sets from the database, virtually assesses his proximity to the job site by using a web mapping service, and automatically assigns a job to the nearest available rightly skilled technician or worker only.
- You can have a holistic view of the work schedules of your entire team, that too from a single dashboard.
- You can also make changes to the schedules through simple drag and drop methods.
As new schedules are made or any changes are done to them, the software sends automated standard communication(notifications/reminders) to the concerned people, thus ensuring that everyone is informed of their duties or work schedules at the right time. - You can set up real-time communication with your team members, track their communication trails with others
- You can keep a tab on who is accessing or sharing what enterprise data
So precisely you get real-time visibility into the performance and productivity metrics of your employees.
How an online waste management platform improves the operational efficiency of the field workforce?
The waste management software not just makes the managing of the field operations easy for the supervisor or the manager, but can also be used by the field technicians or workers to improve their day-to-day operational efficiency. With the aid of the software, the field workforce gets real-time, on-the-move access to the enterprise data, because the software is a cloud system and stores data at one centralized location. The software also sends them automated updates of their work schedules, so they don’t need to maintain any notes of their own. They can access their self-services from any remote location, report to their managers remotely, and collaborate with the team using the real-time communication or collaboration tools of the software.
Conclusion
Selecting the best waste management software for your business is not a challenge. All you need is to collaborate with an IT field service management solution provider. Just check on their customization capacity, as no software will be a ready-to-use solution for you. You will require tweaking it here and there as per your specific business needs. To discuss this aspect with your IT solution provider, and they will be able to get you the right kind of waste management software for your business.
