Rolling out a new legal requirement to 72,000 households in 12 months

The organisation: a national waste operator

A national waste operator provided compost collections within the areas it was regulated to serve. A population-band rule in the regulations kept rural households outside the obligation. Most rural households had no compost service.

The problem: a rule change with no operational answer

Then the rule changed. The band was removed, and every waste operator in the country had to offer a compost service to every customer, however rural. The regulator set a 12-month deadline for it, then watched the delivery.

That left the operator with a regulatory answer and no operational one. It had 310,000 residential customers, no clear view of which of them now qualified, no costing for serving them, and no idea whether the existing fleet and crews could absorb the work.

What the work involved

Three people planned and ran it, our team among them.

• Finding the 72,000. Analysis of the whole 310,000-customer base separated the households that now qualified from those already on the service. 72,000 needed a service they had never had before.
• Turning a number into rounds. Those 72,000 were broken down by region, by county, and then by the individual round each truck drives. An abstract national obligation became a concrete question at every depot: how many more vehicles, how many more crew, against what is already resourced.
• Pricing it to pay for itself. The cost of running the expanded service was modelled against what customers would realistically pay. Bin size, collection frequency and price were then set differently by area, rather than one national answer that would have been wrong nearly everywhere.
• Informing 72,000 households. Email for the customers who had one, posted letters for those who did not, flyers explaining how to use a bin most of them had never owned, and website content covering the service and how often it would run. Our team wrote the content, sourced the print stock, and ran the schedule it all went out on.
• Building the upgrade. Alongside the service the regulation required, customers could pay for an enhanced service. Our team designed the request forms and the process behind them.
• Documenting it for the people who would run it. Our team wrote the documentation and the training material, and trained the office staff and the collection crews on both. Everyone handling the new service, or a customer question about it, had what they needed to answer.
• Putting it on the system. The ERP was updated so every new service reached the customer's account correctly, with the pricing and billing behind it, so the crews, the invoices and the customer record all agreed.

The results: delivered inside the deadline, and paying for itself

• 72,000 new services were delivered in nine months, three months inside the regulator's deadline, phased region by region.
• The expansion was priced to cover its own cost. Margin was never the point: a mandated expansion of this size usually lands as a straight loss, and this one was priced and resourced so that it did not.
• Delivery was monitored rather than assumed. Collections were checked against what each customer had been promised, and the ones that had been missed were triaged and dealt with individually.
• The regulator had monthly and quarterly delivery figures throughout, and audited the rollout on site. Our team handled that relationship directly.

Most organisations meet a rule change as a compliance problem. It is usually three problems arriving together - a data problem, a pricing problem and a communications problem - and the ones that come through it answer all three before they buy the first vehicle. This is the experience behind our consultancy.

See all four case studies, or read making releases boring at a high-street retailer and real-time integration for a recycling operator.