From Tedious to Effortless: The Power of Automation in Daily Operations

Background

We have a client who wanted to enhance efficiency and accuracy for manual tasks, so we focused on automating the reporting process for handling hazardous waste. This initiative has transformed a previously labour-intensive task into a streamlined, reliable system, significantly benefiting both employees and the company's operational processes.

The waste management company specialises in collecting waste from client sites, sorting it at their facilities, and ensuring its onward transportation. A critical aspect of their operations involves handling hazardous waste, which must be reported to the relevant environmental authorities within 48 hours of collection, as mandated by law.

The Manual Process

Previously, the company's hazardous waste reporting was a manual process. Employees logged into an online portal to enter data for each unit of hazardous waste collected, such as "100 kg electronics" or "20 kg paint." This process was tedious and error-prone, often involving copying data from the company’s order-handling system or manually typing information from paper records. Multiple employees spent hours each day on this task, which had to be done twice in many cases: once for the company as the transporter and again for the client as the producer of waste. With tens of thousands of orders involving hazardous materials in the first half of the year alone, the workload was immense.

Opportunity for Improvement

The existence of an API provided by the environmental authority presented an opportunity to automate this reporting process. This automation aimed to save significant amounts of time for senior employees, improve the quality of reporting by reducing human errors, and alleviate the stress associated with the 48-hour reporting deadline.

Implementation of Automation

To automate the process, the team first familiarised themselves with the regulatory framework to understand the requirements thoroughly. They then updated the order system to capture all necessary data, including information previously only on paper, user knowledge, and structured data extracted from free text fields.

They read the API documentation, which, although well-documented, was entirely in Swedish, while the code base is in English. Overcoming this language barrier required close collaboration with users to ensure an accurate understanding of the rules. The integration itself was technically straightforward; the challenge lay in comprehending and correctly applying the complex regulatory and business rules.

The solution involved building an internal facade or gateway between the order system and the environmental authority's API. This gateway translated the authority's terminology into the company's terminology and managed the language differences.

Follow-Up and Results

Initially, the company was unsure about the percentage of orders that would be successfully reported automatically due to potential data quality issues and the API's reliability. To address this, they developed a dashboard to monitor reporting results, reducing the need for IT to field daily queries about failures. Users were empowered with a "retry" button to handle issues independently.

The outcome was overwhelmingly positive. Out of hundreds of daily reports, only a few failures occurred weekly, usually due to data issues. Users could often interpret and resolve error messages themselves. IT monitored data to identify and prevent frequent causes of failures, such as tightening validation rules in the order system to avoid issues like double spaces in names.

Additional Benefits

The automation also alleviated stress related to the 48-hour reporting deadline. Previously, incomplete data within this timeframe led to frantic calls and stress. Now, a preliminary report with estimated data is sent before transport begins, satisfying the deadline. The system automatically updates the report when final data is available.

Another significant advantage was the ability for customers to download copies of reports via the customer portal, eliminating the need for manual email distribution.

User Feedback and Key Learnings

The feedback from users has been incredibly positive. The automation saved them hundreds of hours of tedious work, reduced stress, and improved data quality. Senior employees can now focus on more strategically valuable tasks.

Key Learnings

1. Communication: Close collaboration between developers and business knowledge experts was crucial. Understanding regulatory and business rules was more challenging than the technical implementation.
2. Observability: Comprehensive logging and monitoring allowed the company to trace system decisions and ensure accurate reporting.
3. Empowering Users: Visualising results and providing users with tools to manage the process themselves built trust in the automation solution and offloaded routine work from IT.

Conclusion

This project to automate hazardous waste reporting has been a successful example of how businesses can use technology to streamline processes, improve accuracy, and enhance employee satisfaction. 

This initiative stands as a testament to the importance of understanding business needs, fostering collaboration, and prioritising user empowerment in developing robust automation solutions. It also shows the importance of working with developers who deeply understand your business and are committed to using technology to drive it forward. 

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