AMCS Waste Planner significantly improves both planning time and route quality

The collection and transport of waste is incredibly complex which makes it difficult to maintain a lean and efficient operation while exceeding customer expectations. These challenges can be tackled with Waste Planner, a waste-specific solution that provides planning both for static master routes and real-time dynamic planning for household and commercial waste collection.

Due to the powerful algorithms, the planners are able to produce efficient and realistic routes for both high-and-low-density waste collection. As a result planning time is dramatically decreased from 25% to 75% while at the same time route quality and customer service are improved. Moreover, the reductions of 5% to 25% in mileage and driving time lead to a major reduction in CO₂ emissions, and with that they both contribute to the sustainability of companies and the circular economy.

The waste industry faces a series of challenges

The waste industry is mainly determined by a great diversity both in the collection and transport of household or commercial waste at which each waste stream has its own specific demands. For instance, like different kinds of planning, a large variation in container types, high geographic density, huge amounts of stops in domestic waste collection, challenging service patterns within the commercial waste collection, and the choice of the disposal site. This makes it difficult to maintain a lean and efficient operation while exceeding customer expectations. Companies are faced with a lot of manual and hands-on work with little transparency, rigid business process, and missing responsiveness to customer demands.

AMCS Waste Planner is a mature, fully integrated system for the waste industry that covers all types of waste collection routes, transport, and transfer. This also includes all kinds of planning like static master routes and real-time dynamic planning for amongst others, bins, underground containers, skips, and roll-on/roll-off containers.

Due to the powerful algorithms, the planners are able to produce efficient and realistic routes for both high-and-low-density waste collection. Routes are optimized based on the lowest cost while at the same time taking the service requirements and business rules into account. Key aspects in the planning are easier and more efficient providing the possibility to achieve substantial improvements like planning with different visiting frequencies, choice of disposal centers and vehicle types, integration of ad hoc orders and fixed orders, dealing with weekday and seasonal variations, and long-term logistic structure.

Fully integrated system for all types of waste collection planning

Waste Planner is AMCS’ Intelligent Optimisation which allows all types of planning and consists both of route planning and fleet planning. Route planning provides for large-scale optimization of master plans, scenarios, maintenance of master routes, daily route optimization, and long-term what-if simulations. The system can handle 300,000+ orders in the same optimization and 1,500+ stops in sequence optimization, visit frequencies and patterns, territory work balancing, and also disjointed or overlapping routes. Fleet planning provides agile and automatic route optimization, operational and real-time optimization, and all in one collection, transport, transfer & service. The fully distributed multi-user system offers an enterprise-ready solution and real-time system integration with rich waste and recycling functionalities.

The benefits of AMCS Intelligent Optimisation are significant, for instance, Waste Planner decreases planning time dramatically with 25% to 75% while at the same time customer service and route quality are improved. There is also a decrease in time spent on follow-up through integrated IT systems. Additionally, the reductions of 5% to 25% in mileage and driving time leading to a major reduction in CO2 emissions. Furthermore 5% to 15% fewer vehicles have to be deployed to execute the same routes. Additionally, route quality, employee satisfaction, and planning flexibility are significantly increased and customer service levels strikingly improved, even close to a 100% service fulfillment rate.

AES Ireland: “profitability and customer service are greatly improved”

AES Ireland uses the route planning functionality of Waste Planner to optimise master routes both for household and commercial waste collection. Before, the leading provider of waste management and recycling services in Ireland never created new master plans, appears from the explanation of Darren Sadler, Transport & Logistics Manager at AES. “The routes were planned by the drivers, based on local knowledge. Consequently, the routes were somewhat inefficient and very difficult to execute for temporary drivers, who often missed bins."

According to him, optimizing service days was crucial in order to achieve the best results, and, learn from mistakes. ”The system has improved profitability and customer service greatly”, he says. “This resulted not only in a reduction of approximately 15% in costs per lift but also in a 100% elimination of ad hoc routes for collecting missed bins which are the most expensive routes. With the AMCS Waste Planner AES now is able to take on a great number of new customers with existing vehicles and without additional investments in both the existing fleet and workforce, like planners and drivers.”

Omrin: “Efficient waste collection increases fill levels and collection weight"

Emptying some underground containers too late, with as a result dumped bags next to them. At the same time, other underground containers were barely filled and emptied anyway. Omrin, the household waste collection and processing company in the Northern part of the Netherlands, was able to tackle these challenges with smart optimization software. Around 2,150 underground containers are emptied based on the fill levels after which the system automatically creates the most efficient routes. AMCS Waste Planner allows real-time monitoring during the day, both on the status of the orders and on the locations of the vehicles.

This has led to significant gains for Omrin, which becomes clear from an interview with business consultant Natasja Vemmer. “Dynamic planning and route optimization have enabled the more efficient collection and increased the fill level from 60 to 80% while the average weight of collected waste increased from 260 to 300 kilos per container. Moreover, the planning process can be speeded up, leaving more time for other activities, such as the functional management of the software and setting the parameters in order to achieve even better collection results.” Also, dynamic planning saves a considerable number of trips, cutting both mileage and CO₂ emissions, whereby the AMCS solution is helping Omrin achieve its sustainable goals and therefore support the company’s commitment to building a circular economy.

AMCS Platform

AMCS Intelligent Optimisation is one of the six solutions of AMCS Platform, including Enterprise Management, Intelligent Optimisation, Mobile Workforce, Vehicle Technology, Digital Engagement, and AMCS Analytics. Each of the six solutions seamlessly fit like a jigsaw puzzle into each other, forming the unique end-to-end integrated SaaS solution for the waste and recycling industry.

With this, AMCS Platform drives revenue growth, margin expansion, operational efficiency, and sustainability. AMCS lives up to those words with a product and development team of around 200 people, currently investing 20% of overall turnover in product development. Solutions like Intelligent Optimisation, the AMCS Customer Portal and Mobile Workforce are also integrated into existing legacy software. This way all AMCS customers benefit from the innovative software solutions of AMCS Group.

AMCS Intelligent Optimisation is currently available for legacy customers using:

• AMCS Platform
• Clear
• AfvalRis
• Tower
• Recy (available Autumn 2020)
• PieterBas (available Autumn 2020)