Rumpke Waste management, ERP/CRM Platform

Rumpke is one of the biggest residential and commercial waste and recycling companies, providing service to Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. The project involved refactoring the existing Waste Management Platform based on SAP.

Waste management is all about the activities and actions required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal. This process includes, amongst other things, collection, transport, treatment, and disposal of waste, as well as monitoring and regulation. It also encompasses the legal and regulatory framework related to waste management, covering guidance on recycling, etc.

Rumpke was using a legacy ERP system based on SAP and some other additional applications. They are providing trash collection services for homes and businesses. It is highly complex, fragmented and regulated service. There are various types of wastes, containers, trucks, recycling processes, certification and security related procedures exists in the business.

Rumpke has recycling facilities, disposal landfill areas, trucks, and numerous containers to run this business. They also work with various business partner companies and buy services from them. They provide collection services to millions of customers daily. This complex set of relationships required a comprehensive solution. Applications connected each other created a service ecosystem

Creating a seamless relation between all these parties was the main challenge. Understanding before-after relations of each step and looking to the process with business, customer/employer and technological perspective, understanding existing users and customers pain points and seeking opportunities for improving process were also important areas that we have to focus.

For the project's first phase, I joined the team to create user experience designs for the procurement, back office, and vendor processes. I was also responsible for user interface design.

I started by the research for creating a knowledge base for recycling business, facts about waste management, existing product, and other competitors. I was trying to identify the domains and subdomains in the business processes that would help work on the information architecture. Also understanding the user segmentation, interdependencies of tasks and internal flow of recycling would help create a consistent solution for all domains.

Because of the complexity of Rumpke’s business; creating a consistent user journey on a different section of platform was a challenge. While doing researches, and workshops with internal stakeholders, creating site maps, user flows, wireframes, online interactive prototypes; I always focused on simplified navigation, clean layouts, easy to learn interfaces.

From the technical perspective; the development team was aimed to create frontend with a low-code platform, while SAP and AWS were still using in the backend. This frontend and backend relation creates some technical challenges that directly affect user experience. From a business perspective; there are lots of personal, vendor, service-related, financial and safety regulations related information have to be gathered and this creates a burden to the employees and customers. From the user perspective; there were lots of complex screens and complex navigation exist to be solved. I tried to find a sweet spot between technical, business and user-related requirements.

After successfully delivering the project's first phase, Rumpke employees provide positive feedback on the new look, feel, and usability. With the latest UX/UI style guides and standards, developing further sections will be much easier. Additionally, a design system was delivered to establish a single source of truth, ensuring consistency and improving the overall performance of the development process.