AMCS Group has designed an all-encompassing platform to help waste businesses optimise their costs in a period of disruption.
Australia’s waste management industry continues to undergo rapid change.
As China has been the market for more than a quarter of Australia’s recyclables, the decision to stop sending 24 categories of solid waste offshore at the beginning of 2018 had a direct impact on the commodity price of recyclables. MRA Consulting’s China National Sword: The Role of Federal Government report shows China’s withdrawal from trading recyclables has resulted in lower prices for paper and plastic.
The higher costs have placed additional pressure on recycling processors and their contractual relationships with local governments. Earlier this year, in February, the National Waste and Recycling Industry Council warned that without urgent action to address market changes, Australian recycling contracts could face default. In the ensuing months, some local government and materials recovery facilities underwent contract renegotiations.
Among these challenges, many councils were in 2018 faced with the difficulty of absorbing any potential losses to prevent increasing rates.
To ensure that these costs are absorbed with minimal disruption, collection and recycling businesses can take advantage of the latest software. AMCS Group, a supplier of waste and recycling software, offers a range of systems to make business improvements ranging from contract pricing to eliminating revenue leakage in places not immediately noticeable, to compliance, staff training, administration and planning and fuel savings.
For example, route optimisation can help reduce vehicles on the road by ascertaining the best use of resources for a collection company’s fleet, while also reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Auditing and automating pricing can eliminate the possibility of fraud – safeguarding a business against any potential breaches. Standardisation can ensure a business flows seamlessly with no breakdown in processes or lost revenue due to mixed-up paperwork or rekeying data. In meeting the challenges of new waste management rules and regulations, exporting documents with waste directives and legislation can support compliance.
To help support the end-to-end process, AMCS Group bundled all these areas under one platform. The AMCS Platform is an enterprise-grade platform that runs in the cloud. It aims to drive automation and delivers end-to-end standardisation and optimisation of a company’s business processes, resulting in sizeable cost savings.
The modern, scalable platform bonds industry-specific software with robust optimisation capabilities, ingenuity and on-vehicle technologies.
The AMCS Platform covers areas of the waste industry ranging from municipal to commercial and industrial, construction and demolition wastes, recycling and materials recovery facilities.
For municipal waste collection, AMCS offers route planning, vehicle technology such as weighing and RFID, summer and winter services and customer service support. The platform provides real-time visibility of the collection service progress, providing access to customer and service data to allow incoming queries to be handled on the spot. The result helps to minimise call-out costs and customer service levels. To further reduce interaction with call centres, the AMCS Digital Engagement platform and customer portal provides a customer-facing, self-service solution. In-cab and vehicle solutions can be tailored to suit the individual municipal functional requirements and budget.
AMCS’ commercial and industrial and construction and demolition waste services can be used for frequency-based services as well as on-call services. The system uses intelligent optimisation to enable its customers to extract maximum value from their available budgets. AMCS supplies a proprietary certified weighing system for waste collection that integrates fully with the AMCS waste management solution for pay-by-weight or recycling monitoring programs.
In terms of recycling services, AMCS covers a solution for recycling, material trading and international exports of raw materials. This comprises inbound management, including material grading and recording contamination, in addition to stock management and recycling processes. The system can manage outbound streams, including material sales and trading.
The AMCS platform integrates with a large variety of weighbridge indicators in real time, eliminating weigh ticket data double entry. For materials recovery facilities, AMCS Enterprise Management covers the entire process, including grading inbound material and recording contamination.
Michael Bates, Head of AMCS ANZ, says the AMCS Platform predicts actions while supporting the ongoing transformation of the waste industry.
“The AMCS Platform covers the entire chain. It’s about extracting the most value from every process to deliver results in efficiencies – that’s how you make significant cost savings,” Michael says.
“When choosing software, companies can go for solutions that address specific issues versus the end-to-end process of course. But keep in mind, an end-to-end solution will make the biggest impact in terms of process improvements.”