Integrated Skills Limited joins forces with Yotta to help councils drive down service route costs and build up public trust

The agreement will help councils to streamline their planning of waste collection and other environmental and maintenance services; ensure council crews follow the most direct and fuel-efficient routes and that they keep to agreed customer collection slots. The two companies will work together to provide joint solutions that deliver these benefits to local authorities, initially in the UK, and, later, internationally.

The partnership is already well underway. ISL and Yotta are working on facilitating data transfer and integration between ISL’s route optimisation software, RouteSmart™; its cloud-based routing as a service offering RaaSTM and Yotta’s connected asset management platform, Alloy. The solution will enable councils across the UK to optimise the routes taken by collection, delivery and maintenance teams, saving time and money for the authority and making agreed service slots more accurate and predictable, thereby building customer satisfaction levels.

The partners are also rolling out consultancy services to support the new joint service solution. This consultancy will initially focus on applications within so-called green service areas such as waste collection, street cleansing, green spaces and other environmental services but with the potential to be expanded over time into grey service areas such as highways maintenance and street lighting.

Data drawn from Alloy will be used by ISL in RouteSmart to enhance route optimisation for local authority customers and consultancy services delivered around that, before the strengthened data sets are brought back into Alloy to drive further operational efficiencies.

Yotta and ISL also plan to work on new ways of delivering services in the ‘new normal’, where some services may have stopped since the virus started, including bulky waste and garden collections, and where rounds may be staffed by fewer operatives. The partners will focus on helping bring some services back on-line, at a time when household waste volumes have increased significantly, and strengthening others to better manage operational challenges. The new software and services offering will also help relieve the pressure on local authority collection rounds and help re-balance them as the lockdown lifts.