Summary

A medium sized, reasonably well performing borough council decided to reinvigorate its waste and recycling collection services while developing its waste strategy in order to address both value-for-money needs and meet European waste diversion targets.

It required an improvement from 38% to around 60% recycling for no more than £300,000 a year.
This paper shows how that authority addressed the review and planning process, enabling a saving of a million pounds in the first year, with a fully detailed plan to achieve 68% recycling for £1,700,000 less per annum than their original budget.

The book Visualising Transformation™ contains over 100 diagrams, charts and tables to help provide insight for services to save money by improving services re-investing into the released capacity to add even more value to customers, enabling massive cost savings, typically with no loss of employment.

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Introduction

There are many factors to consider when setting the Council Tax for next year, just trying to maintain services within an ever-reducing budget, with ever increasing demands can be enough of a problem on its own.

Waste will, by definition, be a challenging service to address, in that materials presented for collection continue to increase, a post-recession period which will create a faster increase than previously, as more products are bought, and more packaging is disposed of.

There is an increase in the overall population, with a move to even more; older/ frail people needing support.  There is a general diminishing size of house-holds which again creates more small properties to collect from, and, in general, the collection and separation of materials from flats is generally more difficult than for detached and semi-detached houses.

There is also an array of European legislation targets to achieve over the next few years to divert even more material from landfill, preferably re-using, recycling and gaining energy from the waste.
Behind all of this, the public sector has become less business-like over the last decade, reducing the general capability to achieve innovative improvements to service delivery, relying far too often on cloning ideas from a minority of more forward thinking authorities.

The last major influencer for service design is the national media. While most people accept the changing pressures on the world eco-system, with fast diminishing raw materials, and global warming leading to ever more dramatic weather related extremes, some members of the press find it amusing to cause sensationalism to sell papers, rather than consider the wider issues of stewardship for our children’s children.

Achieving the best outcomes

In any form of service delivery, who is to say what is the best solution? Waste collection touches virtually every person in a community, therefore there will be a considerable variety of concepts as to what is the right way to collect waste, the two extremes may be; all waste is collected in bins with no separation at all, to every form of material should be collected separately, using ten different containers to maximise environmental benefits.

In order to achieve a perfectly balanced, but acceptable collection service which is efficient and effective, the design needs to address issues which are wider than just environmental and customer facing.

The strategic decisions should give consideration to Customers, Environment and Costs. Whatever your motivators within the waste industry, these three aspects will enable a balanced design with optimised outcomes.

If that simple triangle is the basis for the initial discussions, the next steps would be to flesh out what is important for the customers and the environmental needs, comparing possible next steps against the current starting point.

What are the issues to be addressed regarding the environment? Which are more important, local, regional or national issues? What options are there for collecting and treating waste in your area? What is being developed or could be developed alone or in partnership?

Who is to say what the customer actually wants? There will be many demands, wants and wishes for a new collection strategy. The best way to find out what the opinions are is to ask the public, enabling not only quantative responses, but also qualitative replies. Effectively you need to map what is wanted with the boundaries of acceptability defined.

Project Management

There are many ways to manage a project of this kind, those based on Prince 2 methodologies tend to be quite good. However, there must be considerable emphasis on gathering data to create information with many unknowns to start with, which would make it difficult to plan the work once that data is found.

Experience has shown that a systemic based approach, addressing strategic and operational aspects in combination, viewing this as an end to end project, from both customer and material points of view, will enable the most value to be achieved.

To add further value to the review, the business processes of collection, customer interfaces and material treatment should be included, seeking to improve the quality of the service delivery, to enable the release of capacity to do additional work or treatment to materials.

A new methodology has been developed from Lean Systems Thinking, called Visualising Transformation™, for just such a demand. Visualising Transformation has a core methodology based on the Check Plan Appraise Do cycle, which is usually depicted as a continuous circle of events:

Check starts from the initial discussions with a project sponsor, to understand the needs and constraints of the project. What is needed to be achieved, when is it needed by, how will success be defined?

An intervention team will be created using change and waste management experts supported by all colleagues involved in the operations. This team will be trained in change techniques to help create far better awareness of how work is carried out now, what the outcomes are, and what the potentials may be.

Data will be collected and displayed in a number of ways in order to enable new insight for the hosts, so they understand the principles of cause and effect. Work is analysed, mapped with achievements fully understood, and special needs and causes agreed.

Data will be cleaned and transformed into meaningful information. Some previous beliefs will be challenged. Run charts will be produced with comments added to show a change of system, or exception to normal working.

The run chart above shows: How a failing recycling service was invigorated by the flats initiative in June 2005; The long term impact of adding street leaves and detritus to garden waste from Winter 2005/ 06 and; The impact from the looming recession in the summer of 2008 as volumes of cardboard reduced considerably.

What this technique of annotated run charts gives, is the creation of very meaningful information from simple data. Consider how much difference that would make at a board meeting, replacing numbers and explanations.

At the same time the causes of service failure for the customers were being investigated, it was gradually found that poor round designs, and the lack of defined methods of working, created quite different service delivery outcomes for customers which could become confused when teams cross covered, or agency staff were used.

Customers reported defects via a CRM type call centre, this abstract shows several key issues from those systems.

Collections for Recycling (R), Waste (W) and Garden waste (G) were totally separate. Although collections should be on the same day of the week. Misses per 100K were around 125, the chances of missed W and R on the same day if there were no blocked roads was around 1 in 14,000,000. They used to be reported about eight times a week!

33 Tilers Close was a ‘frequent flyer’, always forgetting to put waste out, then reporting it as missed. The call centre thought that the crew were hopeless!! (No the call centre was hopeless!)

Missed waste on 3/8/07 should have been recorded as recycling, that was a CC error. The same applies to Recycling and Garden at 34 St. Leonards.  Note also 36 Manor Way, an assisted collection for Recycling but not for Waste and Garden Waste!

In general a waste collection crew can collect from two properties every 35 seconds when driving down a suburban road. To go back to a reported missed collection will take around fifteen minutes, thus denying the opportunity to collect from some 51 properties. If 100 properties are missed per week, that’s a lost capacity of 5,100 properties or a medium waste round. Note: that a failure rate of around 1 in 1,000 can add over ten percent to the cost of collection.

The best way to analyse missed collections is via cause and effect applying pareto analysis to address the 20% of issues that cause the 80% of failures. In the above case the service design was reviewed and missed collections reduced from 125 a week to 17.

Continuing with the Check review, we carried out an analysis of the residual waste material to see what the capacity was for further diversion or treatment. We carried out postal and electronic surveys of the customers to see what they wanted, would accept or not accept in terms of collection systems. We also established a set of focus groups to discuss those issues with them. We reviewed all collection systems available, benchmarking systems against costs and outcomes. This started to move us into Plan.

We collated all these options into a master spreadsheet, showing over 150 ways to collect then treat residuals and recyclates, each line being assessed for Cost, Customer and the Environment. We scored these on a one to ten assessment, using Red for 1 to 4, Amber for 5 to 7 and Green for 8 to 10. We averaged these three elements for an overall score with a RAG rating on the same basis. In this way a focus group of senior officers and cabinet members were able to whittle down the 150+ options, to 25, where more detail was added, to six, where even more detail was considered, and then a final two schemes in considerable detail, deciding on one for recommendation to the Council.

The waste strategy continued to evolve as operational improvements started and ‘quick wins’ started to occur, enabling better service delivery and increasing positive energy for all involved.

Clearly the waste strategy was taking shape, with a number of parameters to consider, several of which inter-connected. We used an A3 worksheet approach to meetings, most often looking at data from a series of sources to understand how dealing with material in one way would add value down-stream.

The core triangle was evolved with weightings attached to a number of parameters derived from experts and customers.

We developed increasing capabilities to analyse information, sometimes from an array of sources.

The table below was again in the form of an A3 worksheet, designed to ‘walk through’ where we were in terms of materials, and where we could be.

This enabled wide ranging, quite detailed discussions, starting from the most recent actual diversion figures, the awareness of residual waste, and how that changes, to derive an outcomes based on 80% of the people diverting 80% of the additional recyclates as designed.

Having agreed approaches and potentials, the design moved again to containers and collections methods. As was stated above we had agreed what we may do and what the constraints for design were. We had customer feedback showing how they would, or wouldn’t separate and contain materials, which led to us introducing glass collections from the homes, despite having a very respectable ‘bring system’ in place. We also discussed with our existing recyclates processors how we could add value to the materials, and sought to discover where more materials could come from.

Again, simple high impact information made the decision process very much easier.

Failure modes and special causes were being addressed, helping to reduce both and design out failure as the work went on. The quality of the service improved, capacity to improve increased, momentum to change improved.

Note that a number of strategic decisions have been taken to flesh out the strategic direction, still on one A3 page (shown below).

In parallel to the strategic developments, agency staff had been replaced with new permanent relief operatives, an additional correction crew which operated each Saturday was stopped, and additional round which operated on Thursdays was deleted.

Instead of increasing the amount of operatives to deal with failure demand, we had started the journey of improving the service delivery to reduce the amount of resources needed.

The first workshop within Plan for the E2E elements created the flowchart for domestic refuse collections as below:

It had been thought that re-design would have ‘value work’ only, the red areas are non-value aspects so far as customers are concerned while the pink shapes are value enabling; i.e. only the light blue shapes add value for the customer. The prime cause of so much non-value was the decision to retain the customer services call centre! This was considerably better than the existing service designs; however it was the visualisation of rounds via GIS that showed how poor existing round structures were.

This small area of the authority shows how waste was collected randomly on every day of the week, with interconnecting rounds.

Effectively there was no design, and little awareness of how ineffective this was, not only in terms of costs and service delivery, but also in terms of environmental damage and increased congestion.

Thus at the end of ‘Plan’ we were able to show that we could substantially reduce rounds resources by improving service delivery while increasing recycling.

The table below shows that we could reduce costs by over £1/4M per annum, via improving services and a few minor operational changes.

Even with that level of saving, several officers would have considerable spare capacity.

The next phase of the review was the most ambitious; Appraise is the process of reviewing the business and material opportunities, seeking to re-invest the capacities released by more efficient / effective designs, but now adding more services, seeking situation responsive designs and future proofing the service.

Opportunities abounded as a result of harvesting good ideas and barriers to change as ‘Check Plan’ proceeded. We knew that Flats needed a better recycling service, that commercial recycling would be very cost effective, that materials could be cleaned to add value and separated to add value, we just needed to work out how.

Several barriers to improvement were IT related, they had a poor system, which did not address the business issues, failed to monitor performance in real time and created high levels of repetition to produce suspect data.

We designed a simple Dashboard in Excel 2007 to monitor crew performances from existing output fields, which would enable daily updates for each crew. Garden 1 and 2, were the same crews on a fortnightly service. There were considerable design issues with the week two service, especially for crew one.

We were able to show this as a pareto report, run chart and a weekly bar chart. What it did do, was to give very graphic information to the supervisors and managers on an automatic basis each morning.

Returning to the final designs from Appraise, we found that we could re-invest capacity released from fewer failures, into commercial recycling, a vehicle, driver and loader starting a commercial recycling service with a largely pre-paid resource, while the loader was deployed to sort cans from the paper and card in the yard, increasing the paper and card value by £7 per tonne.

This enabled a quadruple cost benefit compared to reducing employment by a single operative. Instead of shipping mixed cans and plastics loose (lightly compacted) in RCV’s, we were able to keep cans from plastics and transport them compacted and baled adding over a hundred pounds a tonne to their value, while reducing haulage costs. (Separating aluminium from steel added even more value).

In each case, we were able to reduce the manpower to do work, then re-invest that manpower into added value. The recycling management team were no longer needed to oversee the customer care area, as missed collection and customer faults reduced by around 80%, so they were able to add value to recyclates, oversee the commercial recycling service and introduce enhanced services for flats to get even more materials from those areas.

In each case, we were able to reduce the manpower to do work, then re-invest that manpower into added value. The recycling management team were no longer needed to oversee the customer care area, as missed collection and customer faults reduced by around 80%, so they were able to add value to recyclates, oversee the commercial recycling service and introduce enhanced services for flats to get even more materials from those areas.

Thus the initial re-design improved from £260,000 to £690,000 saved per annum, however, we were examining every aspect of this on an end to end basis, with several threads of work being reviewed in parallel to one another. We had other aspects still to bring into the final designs.

The original concepts for this project were to improve service delivery and to address future mandatory waste diversion requirements for no more than £300,000 a year extra.

In the first year £600,000 revenue plus £400,000 capital was saved, even after the costs of the design intervention, and during a period of reduced recyclates values.

We ensured continuity with no double counting of benefits, we addressed some issues in design and trial several times to ensure optimum design and operations. The overview of this process can be visualised by the following diagram:

The table above shows how we integrated all development aspects for this project; Thus enabling far more recycling to be diverted, with plans of 68% domestic and up to 50% commercial recycling being achieved for £1,700,000 per annum less than the original budget.

Most concepts had the ability to be achieved straight away, while some, like commercial recycling would develop over three years. The figures above are a mixture of balanced views, none being the most optimistic.

The final implementation plan ran to 27 pages including various charts and tables, it was produced as a paper document and on an inter-active CD, supplied to the whole intervention team, senior officers and the Cabinet.

This had the accounts, detailed operational plans, cost benefit analysis, critical path plan for implementation, and operational case studies for flats, recyclates, use of IT and similar needs.

The borough is still to plan, have rescheduled all major rounds, and have started commercial recycling, with the waste strategy approved.

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About the author: Dave Gaster is a consummate Interim Manager with over twenty five years Director and senior management experience, heading many council departments plus 6 large-scale DSO’s plus a wide array of projects, saving his employers over £40M and bringing services up to upper quartile on many occasions. Most recently he acted as Corporate Director with 2,500 employees and a £100M+ budget.

As author of ‘Quality or Politics’, Dave has broken new ground by clearly showing that local government can achieve excellence despite the problems that central Government create. His new book, ‘Visualising Transformation™’ takes this even further, to address the issues of improved services with radically reduced budgets, with training, accreditation and controls in place to ensure excellent delivery from all suppliers.

To find out more about “Visualising Transformation”, visit www.supportservicesdirect.co.uk