Business rules, site rules, software, and the world is changing, and with all of that in mind, how do you maintain the health of your organisation? Putting long-term processes and measures in place is the best way to ensure continued health and efficient operations over time.
Putting best practices in place for the ongoing health of your facility is the area that’s focused on the least for many organisations, but it’s the key to success. Some of the key areas covered here include:
- Having people trained correctly for the role
- Regular system upgrades – Minimum 1 per year
- Regularly overhauling reporting requirements
- Alignment to operational processes
- Agility for change
Good systems are systems that evolve over time to meet your changing needs. Once you begin to get some visibility on your organisation and community changes, and you can see the impacts on your operations, you are better equipped to future proof your operations.
This is part 3 in our 3 part series about Waste Facility Best Practice. Click the links below to read the other two parts of this series:
Training
Have the people in your organisation completed training for the role they are performing right now and is that training up to date? Ensuring everyone knows how to do their jobs properly and having adequate and regular training in place is key for future success.
Updates
Is your system upgraded and updated regularly? In this day and age, technology gets outdated very quickly, which is why ensuring that regular updates are maintained for your system is so important. Without it, your facility is less equipped to meet the forever evolving technological needs and functions required now and into the future.
Reporting Requirements
It’s incredibly easy for reports to become unorganised and hard to find, especially if no archiving processes and naming conventions are in place. If a report is named or stored incorrectly, staff may run a new report anyway when one already exists. Therefore, you end up with far more reports than necessary and staff waste time by running reports again. So set some time aside to clean up your reports, create folders, naming conventions and set a process in place that everyone can agree upon for saving and accessing reports.
Operational Processes
The importance of having proper processes in place for your operations cannot be understated. Processes that are well thought out and actioned by your staff is the oil that keeps the wheels turning at your facility.
But it’s one thing to create processes and an entirely different thing to get your staff to follow them. That’s why it’s necessary to ensure all staff are aware of the processes in place, acknowledge that they have read and understood the processes and they must be made accountable by management to follow through with these processes.
When creating your processes, you could also consider making it a collaborative effort with the teams who will be carrying out the tasks. Their input will likely provide more accurate insight into the inclusions that need to be in place. Plus, when your teams directly contribute to the processes, they’re more likely to follow through on them.
Agility for Change
Some of our most successful customers have agile teams that easily adapt to change. Change is inevitable, so the more flexible your team is towards change, the smoother and more successful that transition of change will be for your operations.
We often see gaps and differences in the data an organisation thinks they want vs data the team actually needs. Having strong communication and a common understanding between departments is key to ensure the right decisions are made for the entire organisation. A high level of communication and understanding is also helpful when making intricate changes to processes.
How do You Define Success with Mandalay?
Once you have defined success, make sure that information is shared with our team at Mandalay. When we have a clear understanding of what success looks like to you, we can take steps to ensure our software is helping you achieve success.
But the path towards defining that success can be a long one. Before you get to that point, you need to go through the planning and budgeting process, change contracts with clients and undertake many other steps involved in making a system change. There are many things to consider, many stakeholders to engage with in that process and things can progress slowly. With this in mind, we find it takes about a year for organisations to work out what they need from us. But here at Mandalay we are happy to help you through this process in any way that we can.
Once the ball is rolling and our service and technology is truly underway at your facility, feedback from customers like you on what you need from our product is vital to us. This feedback allows us to develop and enhance our product even further and in turn help contribute to your success.
Working with You to Enhance Your Facility Operations
Here at Mandalay, it’s our job to help navigate your organisation through the use of our software and technology.
That’s why we have started running a series of strategic account planning sessions with all of our customers. These meetings are all about working with our customers to find out what’s working well and what isn’t working, and that could be across an array of areas even beyond the points raised in this blog series.
We take our time to understand:
- The impact of individuals in their specific roles
- What pressures are being put on Council by their communities
- What Councils need to do to address these community pressures
- What role do waste teams play in that
- How we can help align our software and technology to meet facility and council goals
Unlike many other vendors, we build a strategic partnership with our customers and a lot of trust is developed between our organisations. That’s why these planning sessions are so important to ensure that what we are doing is well aligned with our customer’s needs.
Whether you’re a current customer who is interested in setting up a planning session with us or if you are new to Mandalay and would like to know more about us, contact us to find out more.
