Canaries in the Coal Mine: What spreadsheets can tell you about your technology

One year in and we have hardly a better understanding of how the Covid-19 pandemic has and will continue to affect us — neither in the waste industry specifically nor as communities and countries in general. We do know, as essential service providers, waste companies are crucially important to the continued functioning of cities.

Indeed, waste and recycling is among the largest expenses annually for city governments. This highlights the incredible pressure on waste collectors to make well-informed business decisions, to consider not just revenue but their broader impacts on the sustainability of business and business practices alike.

At the risk of being dramatic, this calls for a serious transformation. Rising to the occasion means adopting a holistic business perspective, deriving from each business function the value it contributes to the entire organization and basing decisions on the collective data. All of which requires rich communication between teams, systems, regions, literally every piece of the machine.

In case this all sounds apocalyptically expensive: It’s not. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. Between your routing system (TRUX, Routeware, etc.), your CRM (SAP, Methodia, etc.), your ERP (Cayenta, Oracle, etc.), and your reporting software (probably Excel), you have all the most important tools. The trick is getting them all to talk civilly together.

Chances are good that your technology infrastructure grew up in fits and starts, with individual pieces being added when and where needed to fill a gap — software to manage your fleet once fleet size grew, something to handle customer service and client retention once it was justifiable, and on and on in that manner. Most companies haven’t had the luxury of a unified software stack, and waste companies especially, and especially now, need a consolidated approach to data and reporting.

Sounds daunting, but a simple place to start is all your spreadsheets. The disconnectedness of your software creates gaps that you fill manually with spreadsheets, small databases that grow up like weeds in the fissures. Auditing those manual spreadsheets will tell you the most critical places to start thinking about integration possibilities between software. That copying and pasting, saving and emailing files between team members, those are red flags that while the data you need exists, it doesn’t yet exist in the right places.

Now imagine connecting those spreadsheets to your route software, your scale software, your accounting system, all at once, so it’s easy to work with them all. Anyone who knows spreadsheets could open it up, pull in the data, and do the analysis they need without bouncing from source to source copying in values. So your spreadsheet goes from weed to bridge.

Suddenly the ease with which you can create reports from a host of different sources increases — a lot. What were previously disparate data sources now coalesce into what seems a single, coherent source. And the beauty is that this is a much smaller lift than bringing on all new systems, or even a single new one.

It’s true that data fluency is king. But it’s a myth that achieving data fluency requires a big spend on software, copious time teaching teams new tools, or costly automation projects that make IT teams cringe.

Healthy tech, not new tech, is the answer. Tracing those gaps where human work and static files grow will point you in the direction of the biggest holes in your stack, and it’ll make clear that it’s not the software you need to update, just how the software sits in your processes. It’s something we see repeatedly and a major theme with all our clients. It’s something we love to help them with, and not just because we love spreadsheets.