Different councils, different systems, same solution?

Author - Leeds City Council

With 418 principal councils in the UK, the task of finding a solution to a problem that fits all of them is daunting. Nevertheless that is what we are striving to achieve in our efforts to create a dashboard where councils can identify failure in missed bin collections.

It’s been a few weeks since our last blog post but lots of work has been going on behind the scenes! We have now developed our own version of North East Lincolnshire Council’s prototype dashboard. NELC’s dashboard was created using Apex, whereas ours has been made on PowerBI. There was some trepidation around how easy this would be to replicate in a different system, but I am happy to report it has gone surprisingly smoothly!

The graphics look different and the navigation varies across the two systems but we have managed to replicate almost all of the data shown in Apex onto PowerBI. This is an extremely positive step in our journey to create a product that all councils can use. If we can replicate the dashboard in PowerBI, then hopefully it will be easy to reproduce in other programmes as well.

The issue comes where waste services use their own system to collect and show data for missed bins and so there’s a risk of duplicating work. This is a red flag in the public sector when there is a high demand to be as efficient as possible. However, we could look into the viability of integrating existing systems into the dashboard, or perhaps the benefits of viewing all customer and service contact together in addition will prove more beneficial. The great thing about this project is that it moves and changes with time, and new discoveries are not seen as a hindrance but instead as an opportunity to improve.

We will continue to make tweaks to our dashboards and see where we can improve them even further. The prototype is due to be ready by the end of April so check back in a few weeks to find out more about the end result!ر