Partnership will help local authorities address the service challenges of lockdown and beyond
Leamington Spa – 1st June 2020 – Route optimisation provider, Integrated Skills Ltd (ISL) has signed a partnership agreement with asset management provider, Yotta. 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.
The partnership will allow local authorities that have Alloy in place to access what is one of the UK’s most widely adopted route optimisation solutions, in ISL’s RouteSmart™, faster and more easily, driving operational efficiencies for councils and expanding the use of ISL’s software. From Yotta’s perspective, the partnership will allow it to offer a wider portfolio of service offerings to clients.
Steve White, head of transformation accounts, Yotta, said: “We have a lot of local authority customers using our software for the operational management of their services but we are increasingly being asked by customers in the UK and internationally about round and workload balancing and route optimisation provision, which is not our specific area of focus.
Partnering with ISL will allow us to enhance the service offering we can help deliver customers while also expanding our reach into previously untapped markets. With that in mind, we have been introducing ISL to partners across the UK and also in Europe. And we are looking forward to bringing those new capabilities to the market.”
Alan Paget, managing director, ISL, said: “We believe there’s a natural cross-over of clients between Yotta and ourselves. Yotta has always been strong in highways maintenance and environmental services. As it expanded its portfolio in these areas, we saw an opportunity to help provide enhanced route optimisation which is key to delivering optimum levels of environmental efficiency in these areas.”
The focus of the partnership so far has been on providing consultancy services to the Yotta client base. The next stage will be to feed data from Alloy’s Yotta software via an API to ISL’s RaaS cloud solution, helping to return optimised local authority service routes in seconds.
About Integrated Skills Ltd (ISL)
Integrated Skills Limited (“ISL”) is a specialist provider of GIS-based route optimisation software solutions, route optimisation consultancy and related in-cab and online solutions. ISL solutions maximise efficiency resulting in reductions in fleet size, mileage, fuel and planning time as well as more balanced routes/rounds, more accurate ETAs and enhanced route management information. The software is used in operational and strategic environments, eg, for scenario planning when introducing new customers, routes & services and for fleet replacement programmes,. ISL has clients in the UK, USA, Europe and across MENA.. For more information, please visit, https://www.integrated-skills.com/en/
