Biffa cuts out the waste from its communications

A new networking deal and experimental use of mobile devices is allowing waste management firm Biffa to cut costs and boost efficiency

It might be considered rather unglamorous, but waste management is an essential service for every organisation and household. Biffa, one of the largest firms in the industry, provides collection, treatment and recycling of waste across commercial, industrial and public sectors.

The firm recently signed a major unified communications (UC) contract with managed services and converged networks provider Azzurri Communications, with the aim of pursuing a more cost-effective and streamlined ICT strategy. This is important to an organisation where two-thirds of employees work on the move, be they Biffa truck drivers or mobile sales staff.

“We have a huge mobile workforce. We employ 6,000 staff in all, of whom probably 2,000 might find themselves at some point of the day sitting behind a desk, while the rest are out and about. So mobile is very important to us, as is the ability to seamlessly connect the mobile estate and the fixed estate,” says Biffa IT director David Gooding.

A taste for BlackBerrys

Biffa is a very dispersed organisation that operates from more than 200 locations, some of which are pretty remote and consist of maybe one person in a Portakabin. The company is currently a major user of BlackBerry devices.

”We are a big BlackBerry house with around 500 users,” says Gooding. “Staff who need mobile email get a BlackBerry, and then obviously a large part of our business activity is the collection of waste and recyclables. With have a fleet of 2,000 vehicles, which are equipped with specially designed ruggedised BlackBerry devices.”

The devices are used to collect data from customers, download maps and communicate with head office. They also feature cameras and can be used to take photos of overfilled bins.

“Those devices are absolutely fundamental to us as a business in terms of being able to remove paperwork from our cabs, to connect our cabs with the back office and have real visibility of the service,” says Gooding.

“In terms of proof of delivery, we can capture that on the device. We do something in the region of a million collections a month, so it’s a huge amount of paperwork that’s all automated through the system,” he adds.

While company-issued mobile devices at Biffa tend to be BlackBerrys, the firm is now starting to experiment with iPads, allowing a six sales staff to use them for the entire sales process, with the aim of improving efficiency.

“It’s surprised us how well it’s gone; people are starting to really like the device. From what was a very clunky process, it’s really helped to streamline it,” says Gooding.

Sales staff have been able to make a sale while visiting a potential customer, then thanks to the iPad, have been able to perform credit checks, set up a direct debit and get a contract signed within 30 minutes – something that used to take far longer.

“That’s a best case scenario, that’s not something we could have even dreamt of before,” he says. Currently, sales staff have to bring the signed paperwork back to the office and scan it in. “But if the salesperson was out for a couple of days, as they often are, then there’d be that lag and delay, so it’s really helped us streamline our process and caused us to look a lot more professional in terms of the sale.”

Securing business data

The success of the trial means iPads will eventually be rolled out to the remainder of the firm’s 70-strong depot sales team. However, Gooding adds that the devices will be locked down using an Azzurri Communications-provided service to ensure they’re only used for business purposes.

“We’ll use an Azzurri-hosted MDM [mobile device management] platform that provides the security, essentially giving you a container for the corporate data so that it’s secured and locked down. We’re not going to allow staff to have Angry Birds or anything like that, it’s purely going to be a business device,” he says.

Biffa cuts out the waste from its communications

A new networking deal and experimental use of mobile devices is allowing waste management firm Biffa to cut costs and boost efficiency

“But on there as well they’ve got all their sales collateral, so they can do the whole sales presentation using the iPad, which is fantastic, because we would very much tailor our offering depending on who the client is, around their industry sector, and that would then influence the way we make a particular sale.”

So will Biffa go down the iPhone route as well?

“I think that probably will come,” says Gooding. “I think having the device management in place will probably open the door to us being able to offer iPhones, probably only on a small scale to the top layer of management.

“For us if we did BYOD it would be ‘bring your own device, but we’ll supply the SIM card’, because obviously we want the tariff, we don’t want people claiming back at an uncompetitive rate and obviously we’ve just negotiated an ONnet tariff for staff to call their colleagues for free and we don’t want to lose that benefit.”

But for now, it’s BlackBerry that offers the best option of Biffa, with Gooding citing security and staff familiarity with the device as key advantages that will remain for some time yet.

“For us, BlackBerry still represents a good cost, it’s secure, we know it works and our managers enjoy a device that they’re familiar with, that’s easy to use from a security and support perspective. The BlackBerry overall has been really good for us – especially for its mobile email capabilities.

“Disrupting all that wouldn’t be the right move at the moment. We only buy a basic BlackBerry and it’s certainly cost effective at this point in time.”

Keeping costs down

Cost has been a key theme for Biffa in recent years, as with most organisations, and the firm hopes to see more economies thanks to the recently signed three-year contract will with Azzurri Communications, consolidating all of Biffa’s communications into one fully managed service. The deal represents an advancement on a previous five-year fixed-term contract.

“We were aware we were in a position to further reduce our market costs and our total cost of ownership as a result of this, which is estimated to fall over a three-year term between 20 and 30 per cent, so a really decent basis to do the deal,” explains Gooding.

The new deal has also enabled Biffa to improve its network capabilities, allowing the more efficient transfer of ever-increasing levels of data.

“We’ve increased our use of the network and although what we put in in 2008 was a step up from some of the streams of fixed links we had, the applications and business are always hungry for more bandwidth,” says Gooding.

“With respect to delivering training across the network, and more applications running across the network, we stream CCTV images of operational sites, so more and more is being asked of the network all the time. This deal allowed us to increase significantly the bandwidth,” he adds.

It’s that sort of technology and networking, along with the use of mobile devices like BlackBerry smartphones, the iPad and even potentially iPhones that will help enable Biffa to continue to drive efficiency and streamline the operation as it goes about the serious business of taking out the rubbish.

@DannyJPalmer