A new customer who never gets a collection
Your sales person signs up a new restaurant on Wednesday. The contract says weekly food waste and twice weekly general waste, starting Monday. The container delivery is booked, the account is set up in billing, and the first invoice is ready. On Monday the restaurant rings to ask where the collection is. The stop was never added to the round.
The same week, a shop that cancelled a month ago is still on a driver's sheet. He stops, finds no bin, and marks it not presented. A pub that switched from weekly to fortnightly is still being emptied every week, which nobody minds except your costs.
Why rounds lag behind accounts
Account changes and round changes are made in different places by different people. The office changes the account. The round planner, often a supervisor with years of local knowledge, changes the round. Between the two there is an email, a note on a desk, or a conversation in the yard.
- New accounts need a stop placed in the right round and sequence, which only the planner can do well.
- Cancellations and frequency changes are made in billing but not passed on.
- Temporary changes, such as a holiday closure, are agreed with the customer and forgotten.
- Round sheets are printed or exported once a week, so a change on Tuesday waits until next week.
- When the round planner is off, changes pile up.
The underlying issue is that the round is treated as a separate document, when it should be a view of the accounts with an order attached.
The cost of a round that is out of step
A new customer whose first collection is missed starts the relationship with a complaint. A cancelled customer still on the round wastes a stop every week. A frequency change not applied means work you are not paid for or lifts the customer disputes.
The round planner's time is the other cost. Keeping rounds in step by hand is constant background work, and it depends on that person's memory. When they leave, the knowledge of why stops are in a particular order goes with them.
How we feed rounds from the account record
What we build makes every account change produce a round change, with the planner deciding where new work goes rather than having to notice that it exists.
- Account changes in your billing or waste software, new, cancelled, frequency changed, container changed, suspended, create items in a round change queue with a start date.
- The queue suggests a round and position for new stops based on location, collection day and vehicle type. The planner accepts or moves it on a map.
- Cancellations and suspensions remove stops from the right date automatically, and suspensions put them back on the date they end.
- Driver round lists, whether printed or on an in-cab app, are produced from the current accounts each day, not once a week.
- Stops without a matching live account, and live accounts without a stop, are listed every morning as exceptions.
- The reasoning behind the stop order, such as access times or one-way streets, is recorded in notes on each stop so it survives staff changes.
| Account change | Round effect |
|---|---|
| New account | Queued for planner with suggested round |
| Cancelled | Removed from the end date |
| Frequency changed | Collection days updated from the start date |
| Suspended | Removed, then restored on the end date |
| Container changed | Driver list shows new container from the change date |
The planner's week afterwards
On Wednesday the new restaurant is signed. By Thursday morning it appears in the round planner's change queue with a suggested position on the Monday round, right after the bakery two doors down. The planner accepts it, and the Monday list shows it as a new stop with the container delivery date noted.
The cancelled shop disappears from the list on its end date without anyone touching it. The morning exception report is short: one live account with no stop, which turns out to be a customer who moved premises. The planner sorts it before the vehicles leave.
Do your rounds lag behind your accounts?
- New customers have missed their first collection.
- Drivers stop at premises that cancelled weeks ago.
- Round sheets are updated weekly, not daily.
- Only one person knows how the rounds are ordered.
- You cannot quickly list accounts that have no stop on any round.