EnviroWaste, one of New Zealand’s leading waste management companies, was having difficulty pulling actionable information out of its systems.

Staff would spend hours manually creating reports from out-of-date data. Clearly, they needed a better way.

Now it has far more timely management information across a wide spectrum of its operations thanks to iQ4bis. This has resulted in faster responses to customers, tighter management of costs and more detailed analysis of financial results.

At the same time, EnviroWaste is using reports generated by iQ4bis to enhance its customer service initiatives and to win and maintain more customers.

It can generate these reports, using the latest KPIs (key performance indicators), with a few clicks of the mouse.

Basic requirement
“Our management team had a very simple requirement,” says Earl Gasparich, Finance Director for EnviroWaste. “We and our customers wanted to be able to see, at a glance, how much waste we were hauling away from individual customer sites, by both weight and volume, and the price we were being paid on a daily basis.

“We had plenty of data sitting in our various systems. We ran JD Edwards for our financials, RMS for our operational databases, Microsoft SQL Sever to store the information and Access for analysis and reporting. But with all of these resources, it was still a long, drawn out process to get the information we needed. Not only was it difficult to make informed decisions, but we couldn’t relay this basic yet all-important information to clients when requested.”

Gasparich, who had recently been recruited as EnviroWaste Finance Director, had been in similar positions in the past and knew what to do. “We organised a half-day meeting with the management team and identified the critical information that was required for operations, sales, finance, inventory, fleet management and planning,” he says.

“We had some excellent reporting formats that we had developed over the years, but they were static and reflected last month’s numbers, not the current status.

We wanted to be able to aggregate information up to the regional level and drill down into individual customers.

And we didn’t want to re-invent the wheel. We had all the data we could possibly want. We just lacked a mechanism to pull out the key metrics and display them in an easy-to-use manner.”

To further complicate things, EnviroWaste was growing rapidly by acquiring regional waste management companies and incorporating its operations into the overall organisation.
“So we were getting even more assets and clients to track as well as more data to process,” continues Gasparich. “The databases were in a variety of different formats. We really needed a way to normalise the information and display it a standardised manner.”

Fast implementation
Gasparich says he knew the people from iQ4bis through an earlier role at QualCare,” “I’m a big fan of fast solutions. We had a very real requirement and iQ4bis was just the right package for our needs. I made a few phone calls, the team at iQ4bis had a quick look at our data and report formats and that was it. They gave us a proposal and we accepted.

“An advantage of iQ4bis is that it is extremely costeffective.

The upfront costs are manageable and we get an almost immediate payback. Given the results that we achieved compared to the outlays, it is a very lowrisk proposition. In a few weeks we had the system up and running with the JDE data. The RMS data was a bit more complex, but iQ4bis had that link running shortly thereafter. Our managers were getting exactly what they wanted to see.”

Fast implementation is a hallmark for iQ4bis. “We have what we call the rapid implementation methodology,” says Asj Smith, General Manager – APAC at iQ4bis. “We have pre-formatted templates for building the three-dimensional OLAP cubes that underlie our browser-based GUI. We were able to replicate EnviroWaste’s existing reports so that managers didn’t even have to adjust to new formats. Plus we set up ‘views’ customised for each class of user. Because we do this so often, it is second nature to us.”

He is full of praise for the iQ4bis team, especially Manu Ikkala, one of their senior BI consultants. “We ask him to do something different or add an enhancement and he does it quickly. In fact we have subscribed to the iQ4bis Professional Services Programme which provides four days a month of service work. Now that we have been using iQ4bis for a while, we have plans to incorporate the benefits into even more aspects of our business. This programme helps us budget for the initiatives and gives us a clear-cut roadmap for further developments.”

Concrete benefits
EnviroWaste is now using the information generated from iQ4bis across the company. “We have developed a model for fixed asset reporting as well as fleet management KPIs,” says Gasparich, “and are in the process of enhancing capabilities around our customer reporting. We are also improving the front-end interfaces by adding a set of customised dashboards for the various user groups.

“Another advantage is that, as we acquire new companies as part of our growth plans, we can easily assimilate their information resources using iQ4bis DataServer. The ability to analyse this information in near real-time cannot be overestimated. Whenever we visit existing clients or approach prospects, we can give them up-to-date reports that show exactly what we can provide in respect to reporting back to them on their waste collection trends.

“This ability gives us a very real competitive edge in the marketplace as no other waste management company in the country has these capabilities.”

Asj Smith            
General Manager- APAC
iQ4bis Management Software Limited
+64 9 366 2635
Visit our website www.iQ4bis.com

10/7/1_ex_m_h_nl