Operational Excellence: Lessons from Urban Waste Management

The Client

The client's main activities are municipal waste, recycling, and collection from 250,000 households in a major UK city. They provide street security and cleaning for council buildings, schools and other local buildings. There are approximately 850 employees, and the business has a turnover of around £55m.

The Challenge

The business had undergone several changes of senior leadership over the past two years, and because of that, the various impacts of COVID, Brexit, and the cost of living crisis led to a challenging financial situation where the business was heading for a significant loss. In addition, due to the many changes in senior leadership, operational improvement had stagnated, and no one within the business had that focus or capability.

The Solution

The approach developed for the client was quite bespoke and varied according to the challenges presented.

• Several projects required industrial engineering, business case development and board approval. 
• Three key business processes were reviewed and improved: overtime, purchase orders and agency use.
• Training A3 practical problem-solving to the exec and management teams to develop problem-solving skills across the business.
• Introducing daily tiered meetings across operations to improve direct communications, issue escalation and reduce the volume of emails.
• Getting the exec team to see the problems through a “back to the floor” approach (gemba walks).

They all involved setting up cross-functional teams, using lean business improvement tools and facilitating workshops to gain consensus and drive change implementation plans to deliver improvements.

The Results

Business analysis led to savings of £50k made through the cessation of a weighbridge project and re-justification for a can/plastic sort machine for a new facility – value £1m approx.

From the process improvements, significant improvements were made to reducing overtime spend to budget levels, reducing late PO approvals by 20%, setting a new compliant process for POs and creating a plan to reduce agency use significantly.

The introduction of the tiered daily meetings significantly reduced email traffic and improved communications (direct feedback received from managers).

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