WM's elements® analytics platform made it easy for the Sustainability Manager at a national grocery retailer to report diversion and identify targeted opportunities to advance a zero-waste plan.
The National Account Experience
A case study in centralized sustainability reporting
National Business Reports on Zero-Waste Goals
With elements® Sustainability Dashboard
Customer Profile
- Industry: Grocery
- Locations: 1,600+
- National Account Since: 2017
Customer Benefits
- On-demand access to sustainability metrics in elements®
- Faster end-of-year diversion reporting
- Visibility to high and low performing Divisions
- Ability to understand drivers behind diversion discrepancies
Customer Challenge: Decentralized Data
To comply with government regulations and report progress against the business’s zero-waste goals, the Corporate Sustainability Manager for a national grocery retailer faces an enormous task each year: compiling, validating and analyzing waste disposal data for more than 1,600 retail and distribution locations. Since the company’s data includes a combination of tonnage from weight tickets and volumes for commercial collection, she has the additional challenge of calculating the weight of commercial trash sent to landfill. When her National Account team introduced the elements® reporting and analytics platform, she was able to get the answers she needed as well as more insights than she ever expected.
Solution: Quality, Consolidated Data
The elements® analytics and reporting platform brings together real-time information from multiple data sources to give National Account customers insights about financial, environmental and operational metrics and opportunities they can’t get anywhere else.
Logging into her company’s diversion dashboard, this Sustainability Manager found all the disposal information she needed, already organized by service type and material type, and converted from volume to weight. In addition, her National Account team built a customized hierarchy to group her stores by Division. This structure let her to view the performance of each Division and identify not only which need the most support but also in which operational areas, such as recycling and organics. For example:
- While relatively similar in store size and sales volume, there was a 230 ton difference in annual tonnage between the highest and lowest performing locations in one Division.
- In another Division, she looked into organics diversion and found a 50 ton difference between the highest performing store (53.3 tons) and the lowest (3.5 tons).
Customer Feedback
“This is brilliant,” was how this Sustainability Manager responded when she first logged into elements®. As in previous years, she approached her reporting season expecting to spend hours digging up data and performing lengthy calculations.
But this time she was struck by the depth, organization and completeness of her business’s data in elements®. Organized by total material volume, service type and material stream, the tool saved her hours of time and gave her new ways to identify trends she had not previously seen.
Results: Streamlined Sustainability Reporting
This Sustainability Manager is now working with her dedicated WM team to understand and address performance discrepancies, and coach all locations to reach the best-in-class metrics attained by peers in their Division.
This customer approached elements® with a data and reporting challenge, and emerged with targeted insights about how to increase diversion, minimize landfill and drive excellence across her business.
The National Accounts Advantage: Analytics
For businesses with sustainability goals, year-end brings the dreaded task of reporting — and hours upon hours of gathering, processing and compiling data. WM's elements® analytics platform has transformed this process. By consolidating and normalizing all recycling and disposal information in one place, it’s easy for customers to pull diversion metrics and report out on the successes of their National Accounts program.
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