city of berkeley

Challenge

The program has been wrestling with a legacy billing and work order system, supplemented by — but not integrated with — its CRM system. Finally, after careful long-term internal and third-party evaluation of its technology needs, the existing paper-based patchwork solution was deemed outdated, inadequate, and incapable of providing even basic functionality for running a modern-day Zero Waste program.

The inefficiencies in business workflow, delayed community response times, and limited reporting and analysis have hampered efforts to manage city refuse, recycling, and organics collection effectively. In addition, the legacy tools have required heavy support from its IT staff just to maintain the system’s status quo.

Solution

As part of its technology plan going forward, the city will incorporate and implement the requisite Zero Waste High-Level Processes into its new enterprise system. The AMCS Platform maps to those Zero Waste processes:

• To broaden constituent self-service capabilities, including online bill payment, the AMCS self-service Customer Portal serves to empower residents and other stakeholders to access and manage their accounts online, 24/7. Via the portal, they can manage and safely pay invoices, sign up for autopay, make order requests and changes, update their account information, and view their account history.
• To optimize waste routes and provide real time mobile communications, the AMCS Mobile Workforce GPS-based routes are pre-planned and distributed to drivers on mobile devices. To prevent missed pick-ups and provide proof of service for invoicing, drivers use an advanced point-and-click interface. Should route conditions such as traffic jams arise and threaten to slow progress, automatic re-routing keeps things moving. Live interaction between the office and drivers will enable dynamically updating orders in real time, obviating the need for extra trips — or paper orders.

These new efficiencies will bring significant reduction in fuel and labor costs and improvement in vehicle mileage and emissions, supporting the city’s reduction of carbon emissions efforts and its Climate Change Action Plan.

• To improve business processes based on best practices, improve business and system integration, eliminate duplicate data entry, and improve access to data and user-friendly reporting tools throughout the organization, AMCS Enterprise Management will streamline all processes across the business into one system with end-to-end visibility, using automation to maximize efficiency, and integrating each capability into the whole.

Results

The AMCS self-service Customer Portal considerably broadens constituent self-service capabilities, such as safely paying invoices online and submitting or changing orders for service. The result: increased customer engagement with the organization, along with substantially decreased customer service staff labor costs.

AMCS Mobile Workforce optimizes waste routes and provides real-time mobile communications for order updates, for example. The result: greatly reduced fuel and labor costs as well as mileage and emissions.

AMCS Enterprise Management streamlines and automates processes across the board according to Zero Waste best practices. The result: vastly improved access to data and reporting tools with elimination of duplicate entries.

In summary, the cloud-based AMCS Platform functionality best meets the City of Berkeley’s Zero Waste process requirements — and provides the superior security, scalability, and mobile capabilities of the cloud.