The company's IT director describes how a nationwide garbage-hauling firm is bringing its communications technology up to date to address improved customer service, consumerization of IT, and a consolidating industry.
Garbage pickup might seem like a pretty low-tech industry. In fact, it seemed that way to many people within the industry for quite a while. Doug Saunders, Director, Information Technology at Republic Services, Inc., the nation's second-largest waste hauler, concedes as much: "We've been behind the curve with communicating directly to our customers for some time," he said. "We're traditionally a non-technical industry."
But when you think about, supporting the seemingly simple task of picking up the garbage is, of course, as complicated a resource management and customer service undertaking as any job that involves creating the stuff that eventually gets thrown away. Trash hauling involves managing fleets of trucks, dealing with local, state and federal laws, winning new customers and then providing the level of service that keeps those customers with your firm, and generally growing the business—often by acquisition. Doug Saunders and his colleagues at Republic are pushing hard to use communications technology in all these aspects.
Customer Acquisition
Doug Saunders represented Republic Services on the opening keynote panel at this year's Enterprise Connect Orlando 2011 conference (see the video embedded at the end of this article), and his first statements on that panel were the same as those he began with when I conducted a follow-up interview this month: Republic's biggest challenge is expanding customer service beyond the telephone.
Republic does residential pickup, but not surprisingly, it relies heavily on commercial, industrial, and government customers (it has 3,000 municipal contracts) for much of its business—for example, national contracts with retail chains. Many of these customers are conducting their own communications technology migrations, and they want to be able to work with Republic in ways that fit with their own technology directions: For example, if a store needs a special "pull and return" of a dumpster—i.e., the bin filled up before the regularly scheduled pickup time and it needs a special run—that's traditionally been done with a phone call to a call center. But now, commercial customers increasingly want to use SMS texting or the Web or even social media like Twitter to get such services onto the schedule. "It's all about giving the customer the choice of how they want to communicate with us," Doug told me.
And he pointed out that Web-based business has changed customer expectations across the board, regardless of who the customer is dealing with. Republic's main competitor in trash hauling may be Waste Management, but that’s not who the competition is when customers are judging customer service levels: "It's FedEx; it's Amazon—that's who everyone compares us to," Doug said. The end product or service may be different, but customers no longer expect garbage haulers to use low-tech communications.
And for Doug Saunders, that technology need extends not only out to the customer, but into the cab of the garbage truck. Republic relies heavily on push-to-talk Nextel service to keep its drivers in touch, but that needs to change in the near future as well. Republic doesn't have a specific product-deployment roadmap yet, but onboard electronics will be deployed in the coming years, with the goal of giving customers more real-time information about pickup times, and keeping drivers updated on changes and service needs in real time.
There are savings and revenue opportunities in this kind of deployment, Doug Saunders pointed out. Republic spends $2 million-$3 million per year just on printing out route sheets, a figure that could be drastically reduced if not eliminated if that information were on portable connected devices in the cab. Real-time tracking also lets Republic manage the fleet more efficiently and react in real-time. And onboard video in the truck or on a mobile device could also help; for example, in many jurisdictions, ordinances require that dumpster lids be kept closed at all times. So if a driver can capture or send video of an overflowing bin during a regular pickup, company salespeople ought to be able to sell that customer on more frequent pickups or a larger container, either of which would mean more revenue for Republic.
Understanding the Business: The Republic Way
Doug Saunders and the rest of the IT team at Republic clearly understand how the business side runs, and that's not accidental. IT participates in 11 steering committees that are each co-chaired by one IT person and one person from the business side. Committees include financial, field applications, sales, Web, and one of the more recent ones, Unified Communications. The technical people who support that particular business function meet with the business people to align the two interests, and then they measure it against something called, "The Republic Way."
The key word in this endeavor is "durable." As Doug Saunders describes the challenge posed for any technology adoption: "What is your plan for making sure this is actually used? If it isn't a good plan, it doesn't get approved.... It has to be durable, it has to stick, it has to have value."
The reason that can be a particular challenge is that Republic has grown primarily by acquisition. Its largest such move came when it acquired waste-hauling rival Allied Waste for $6 billion in 2008. The merged company faced all of the familiar challenges we know from large mergers, and at the same time, it continually faces another issue—the waste-hauling business is in the midst of a long-term consolidation, from a highly localized business to one dominated by a couple of large players who have been buying up the small local firms. In the boom times of the '90s, Republic was doing an acquisition a week; that's now slackened to about one a quarter.
Often the owner of the newly-acquired local firm stays on as the GM of the new Republic operation in that particular geography—and this person isn't always someone who's open to changing the way they operate to conform to Republic's business practices. And yet the technology and business practices need the economies that helped drive the acquisition in the first place. Hence the need to use the structure of the Steering Committees to, among other things, prove in technology approaches so they can be standardized across these various new businesses as they’re brought on line.
Mobility
As noted above, mobile technology is key to improving communications in the waste hauling business, and that's a particular challenge that Republic is tackling now. But it's an issue not just for the drivers picking up the trash; it's also something that Republic is confronting for its upper-level management, and here the challenge isn't necessarily different from that of any other company facing the consumerization of IT.
The company had been strictly a BlackBerry shop for its 3,000 smartphone users, and barred iPhones and Androids. However, in the past year, IT had found itself facing a "huge wave, a huge push to let top level executives use those devices," Doug said. He admits that IT was "stuck flatfooted" by the rush to iPhone and Android; "It's such a big problem that's just engulfed us from a mobility standpoint."
However, they soon found themselves having to "embrace that instead of fighting it," because of a mandate from the CEO, who was among those top execs wanting to move off BlackBerry. He forced the issue by sending down a mandate: The company would give 500 Android phones to executives attending an internal conference that was set to begin February 21. That mandate came down February 4, so the Republic IT team had just two and a half weeks to find a solution and have it ready to roll out.
The first decision was to go with Android rather than iPhone, a move that was made largely because the need for Nextel phones in the trucks makes Republic a big Sprint shop—which in turn meant the iPhone wasn't an option if they were going to stick with Sprint as a service provider. The IT team didn't have a lot of time to build internal applications for the Androids, and as a legacy BlackBerry shop, "We're not really using mobile applications yet," Doug said. Republic is moving to salesforce.com, so they'll be able to integrate that with mobile, and the IT team also built a sample application of the event agenda for the conference at which the Androids were rolled out. The Android rollout became one of the key parts of a conference whose theme was, "The Road Ahead."
The road ahead for any company moving from BlackBerry to Android or iPhone often includes concerns about security, and Doug said Republic knows that this problem isn't solved yet, but is hoping to see mobile management solutions with BlackBerry-type security features for Android later this year.
The other mobility trend he expects to hit Republic in a big way is tablets—though this is more of a future decision. On the office side, he said, "I do think that next year, we're going to see a lot of our workforce give up their laptops and move to tablets." And for the drivers, he said, since there aren’t really special-purpose mobile devices for garbage trucks, he expects Republic will be outfitting drivers with tablets at some point in the future. But again, he's preparing for the fact that, while sales people and others might be clamoring for tablets, drivers may not: "Are they still going to pick up the old Nextel and try to use that?" So they'll need buy-in, for the driver to embrace the improvements provided by the new technology—"The guy in the truck still has to care."
Long-term Planning
So how does Republic turn all of these ideas into reality, and take all these trends and leverage them to continue building its business? In the mobility space, IT is working toward a three-year goal of being able to support any mobile device, so that end users can use whatever they want—IT has already decided to "embrace that instead of fighting it," Doug said.
For the larger technology picture, Republic is developing a five-year plan that will touch everything from supporting national accounts to developing strategies for the contact center and Web-based customer service.
But to give you an idea of how this goes in the real world, even as Republic moves forward with its more advanced UC and mobility deployments, it's still moving steadily with its fundamental IP overhaul. The company began rolling out IP telephony in 2002-2003 and shortly afterwards standardized on Cisco. Rolling out that basic infrastructure is still proceeding at a pace that makes sense for the business—at this point, it's about 60% done, Doug Saunders said. At the same time, Republic’s overall IT infrastructure plan has the company consolidating to two datacenters.
To hear more from Doug Saunders and our other panelists from the opening session at Enterprise Connect Orlando, watch the video below:
