TOMRA Collection Australia has moved its customer and field service onto a single platform to boost uptime of its fleet of automated collection points for beverage containers across the country.
TOMRA Collections Australia’s Phil Parbury (right) speaks at Dreamforce.
The company’s shipping container-sized collection points are used in five states to collect cans and bottles for recycling, in return for a 10c refund per container.
Core service manager for Australia Phil Parbury told Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that when the company first set up in Australia, it launched in a “startup mode”, cobbling together systems to support its growing operations.
“[It was] whatever we could do very quickly,” Parbury said.
“It was a little bit chaotic, so we were looking to take a step back and say, if we were going to do this again, how are we going to do it properly?”
“Properly”, in Parbury’s mind, meant having one platform used by all teams, that acted as a single source of truth and that could scale with TOMRA’s expansion.
“We’re still growing quite quickly, we’ve got over 2000 machines at 500 sites across Australia,” Parbury said.
“Uptime is our main KPI – it’s all about making machines work all the time.
“We generate revenue based on containers, so if [the collection] machines aren’t working we can’t generate any revenue.
“Part of uptime is obviously fixing things when they go wrong, which is why getting the right person with the right skills, parts and tools to the right site to get everything fixed as quickly as possible and keep everything running [is important].”
Parbury noted there were multiple ways that TOMRA might learn that one of its collection points isn’t working.
“We might get a report from a customer that this machine’s not working, or one of our contractors might tell us something, or we’ve also got a tool called ‘TOMRA Connect’ where we’re monitoring the machines remotely as well,” Parbury said.
“There’s all these different streams of information, and we needed to have a way to properly address that and bring that in so we could get things sorted as quickly as possible.”
The company underwent a six-month internal scoping exercise to define what it wanted from an uplift of its service platform, before shortlisting IFS – its current enterprise resource planning vendor, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce for the project.
After a further eight months of vendor evaluation, it went with Salesforce Field Service, Parbury said, because the vendor spent considerable time at its site learning the requirements and “building a demonstration that was tailored to what we were looking for”.
“It was much easier to picture the solution we were going to get, whereas some of the others were probably a little bit generic. You had to really try to imagine what it was going to do rather than see what it was going to do,” Parbury said.
TOMRA used Arcturious as an implementation partner, and the work was completed over four months in 2023. The system has been live for exactly one year.
It has since built on that initial deployment with the enhanced scheduling and optimisation engine (ES&O), which it uses to help manage and allocate field service jobs. The company directly employs 30 technicians and some additional maintenance staff.
“We were originally planning to do ES&O right from day one, but we became quite conscious that we were doing a lot and it’s only as good as the data you put into it,” Parbury said.
“We wanted to make sure we were getting the data in properly, and everyone was comfortable with the system before we tried to use too much automation.
“The feeling was to keep it a little bit more manual to start with, get people comfortable with it, and then we’ll start to bring in the automation to help us out later.”
Once a field service job is received, a work order is created and added to the field service dispatcher console. For more urgent work orders, the dispatcher may call the technician directly, “especially if they need to change [travel] direction or turn around.”
“If it’s scheduled in a few hours’ time or the following day, then a notification on the phone is sufficient and the technicians know to keep a close eye on their schedule within the field service app,” Parbury told iTnews.
“We built quite a bit of automation to avoid things getting missed.”
This includes an automation that detects unfinished work orders and reschedules them for the following day, though Parbury noted that as the machines are monitored in real-time anyway, there are multiple sets of eyes on uptime, ensuring that machines are repaired in a timely manner.
The early results of ES&O are good: “We’ve seen a 20 percent reduction in technician response time to high-priority jobs since we fired it up, so it’s been very productive.”
Parbury said the Salesforce-based field service platform as a whole is a lot simpler, with fewer moving parts around the management of work orders.
“One of the things we were trying to do was get to one platform, and in the first couple of months after we went live, we’d wound down, I think, five other tools,” he said.
“Pre-Salesforce, to make a work order you had to touch six different systems and now it’s one – it’s just Salesforce, which has been really helpful considering the number of work orders the team have to create.
“There’s other tools we plan to fold into Salesforce [now as well].”
Parbury added that the Salesforce platform had scaled up alongside TOMRA’s growing volumes of machines and support calls.
“We’ve got something like 30 percent more sites than we had pre-Salesforce so that efficiency piece makes a real difference,” he said.
“With some of the changing needs we had on existing sites as well, it equated to a change of workload where we have 30-to-35 percent more calls; something like 200 percent more emails, which is crazy; and about 60 percent more work orders as well.”
Parbury said TOMRA had been able to keep the customer service team relatively stable in terms of numbers, with the Salesforce platform covering the additional workload.
Ry Crozier attended Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.