Hume City Council receives award

Hume City Council has won the Spatially Enabling Government Award for its development of a spatial mapping system to support its waste collection process. This has significantly improved the efficiency of its customer services department, which received over 11,000 queries relating to waste collection in the last 12 months.

The most significant of these enquiries relate to bins that have not yet been collected. The council developed a tablet PC global positioning system using Autodesk AutoCAD Map 3D to map waste collection data such as routes, dates and addresses, and predict potential problems at collection points. The data creation and editing capabilities of the Autodesk solution were particularly useful in doing this.

"In the past, we had no way of knowing why someone's garbage was not collected. With this system, our customer service department can now quickly access information about collection routes and times to give homeowners a satisfactory answer," said Recep Alakus, Hume City Council's GIS administrator.

Following the success of the initial 12-month pilot involving one waste collection vehicle, Alakus says the program will be rolled out across the council's entire fleet of waste collection vehicles over the next 12 to 18 months.