Prashant S Maski
1MS08IS407




1. How often Waste management use this application ? Support your answer.

Ans: The case says that the company operates 18,850 routes in every state in united states, even if one route is eliminated, which includes driver, fuel, truck and maintenance, it can save u $10,000 a month, which is $120,000 per year per route. Over a five year period the company can save almost $500 million.

To achieve this amount of savings company made use of an decision making application called "WasteRoute". Before the application was introduced executives of the company faced lot of problems like, the executives had to manually trace the route for each truck, any new customer requesting for the service led to rerouting which took 6 to 12 months to plot the route. After the application was introduced, the application fetched the data from the company's sales, customer service and databases, using which the application plots address to a map, and then recommends route changes to increase efficiency.

The application must be used daily,Waste Management has broken the application into four major components: Service Boundary Analysis (SBA), weekly balancing, clustering stops and optimizing daily route. SBA gave opportunity to remove any overlapping territories between neighboring WM sites. Weekly balancing attempts to move customers to different days of service if necessary to balance the workload each day of the week. Review of each customer’s container size and frequency. If a customer has a small container and is serviced three or more times per week, it is advantageous to exchange the container for a larger one and reduce the frequency of service, thus reducing the cost of service for that customer. The clustering step gives the user a first look at the geographies of the routes without creating individual route sequences. The optimization step creates the sequences for each of the daily routes. Following the creation of the routes, driver and management reviews concluded the predeployment steps.


2. What other variables do you think the application should take into consideration?

Ans: The variables the application must take into consideration are:

- Hygienicness: Waste should not be collected at the wrong time i.e while having food etc.
- Develop efficient trash pickup routes that minimize time in traffic,expenditures for fuel and employee travel time. Develop weather and equipment failure contingency plans, based on your potential customers' needs.
- Profitability: select a route in such a way that it covers maximum customers in less cost.
- Customer service: Customers must be served by offering them appropriate pricing options.
- Safety
- And the application should not eliminate the jobs of the driver.