City council says app has enabled it to easily beat service level agreement on collections
Glasgow City Council has claimed that a new mobile app for requesting bulky waste collections has speeded up response times in the months since its introduction.
It said that 90% of requests are now completed within 10 days, much quicker than the 28 days outlined in the service level agreement.
Trials of the Bulk Uplift app began in the city in August 2016 and more than 50 frontline cleansing operatives working from four cleansing depots have now been trained to use it.
It provides real time information on requests from the public and automatically groups them into neighbourhood areas, sending them onto the waste collection teams through their smartphones.
Staff use the app to record when they arrive at an address and when they leave - closing off completed jobs. They can also record any problems with access and use the camera phone to take images of other issues discovered on arrival at an address - for example, if the request was to uplift an old bath but on arrival it is full of bricks and is too heavy to lift.
The photograph is then sent to supervisors via the app for a quick decision on to how to proceed. Supervisors can contact the resident who made the request, asking them to remove the bricks so the bath can be uplifted.
Smoother service
A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said: "We're adopting new technology to work smarter, improve efficiency and enhance services for the public. The new Bulk Uplift app is being used internally by our staff to streamline the service and make it run more smoothly.
“It has made the service faster and more flexible. It is far more environmentally friendly than the old paper system and minimises time consuming admin.
"We've received good feedback from customers who have noticed that items are being removed faster."
The city council has made its waste collection services the focus of a group of digital initiatives in recent months. Just a few days ago it announced plans to run trials on 'smart bins', using sensors to monitor how heavily they had been filled in managing collections.
Image from Glasgow City Council
