01 December 2008
One of the gigs at this year's Roskilde Festival, the largest music festival in Europe, didn't take place on the stage but in the trash. Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen joined forces with its trusted partner Tegos, a solution provider for the recycling and waste management industry, to implement an innovative solution for “Garbage Information Gathering” (GIG) that simply cleared the place up.
Each year in July, the quiet fairgrounds outside the provincial town of Roskilde, about a 30 minute drive from Copenhagen, are transformed into a cacophony of music, people, tent camps, and general abandon. It's Woodstock all over again in Europe, with more than 80,000 people partying hard – and generating a lot of trash. So every year at festival time, the non-profit Roskilde Festival organisation grows from its 25 paid staff to an army of more than 20,000 people - volunteers who take on many of the tasks involved with executing a festival of this size, including collecting trash.
GARBAGE PROBLEMS
“Traditionally, we have huge problems with garbage,” says Esben Danielsen, the official spokesman for the Roskilde Festival. “The festival makes up a city of more than hundred thousand people and last year alone we were left with three thousand tons of garbage when the festival ended. It is a major challenge for us to find a solution to keep the area clear of trash for aesthetic, environmental and health reasons, and also to avoid fire hazards.”
This year, the solution came in small, handheld Windows Mobile devices which were used by the waste collection crew members to better coordinate the dispatch of garbage trucks and workers to hard-hit areas. The waste management solution – known by its quirky abbreviation GIG (‘Garbage Information Gathering') - was a result of collaboration between Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC), Tegos and the Roskilde Festival.
DYNAMICS MOBILE SOLUTION
Tegos is a Microsoft partner that has created a vertical solution for waste management using the Microsoft Dynamics NAV product for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) which has been developed at MDCC. For the GIG at this year's Roskilde Festival, they made their solution mobile using the Microsoft Dynamics Mobile technology. As the Roskilde Festival already used Dynamics NAV for its daily resource planning operations, the mobile solution was easily implemented and the crew members were up and running with minimal training.
“Before our software came along, people had to phone in that they had found garbage lying around on the campus and the poor girl at the office had to scribble it down on a piece of paper before entering the data into a central data base,” says Gary Winter, CEO of Production and System Architecture at Tegos. “This year, using our Dynamics Mobile solution, each waste crew member just sent a mobile photo of the garbage pile along with GPS coordinates directly into the system, allowing the central administration to better plan the waste collection routes based on needs.”
This GIG perhaps didn't attract as much applause among the festival attendees as the gigs performed on the famous Orange Stage. However, the usually devastated festival grounds were left cleaner than ever – showing the way to go not only for a tidier but also for a safer and healthier environment.
“IF WE CAN DO IT HERE, WE CAN DO IT ANYWHERE”
“The Microsoft Dynamics Mobile technology offers a huge potential that goes far beyond the waste management industry. Sales, service, production, warehouse, time registration and location-aware solutions are just some of the areas where we see companies benefit greatly from using mobile solutions. A study from IDC has shown that there is a 459 percent annual ROI (Return on Investment) on the implementation of mobile business solutions in small and medium-sized companies. However, it is not all about increasing productivity and competitiveness. In the health care industry, for example, mobile technology can help ensure proper medication and more effective patient treatment. Just imagine the positive effects of using RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification) rather than ordinary name tags on patients. This would allow doctors to instantly retrieve and evaluate all relevant information about each patient and take medical action accordingly and immediately.” Bjarne Schøn, Product Unit Manager for the Microsoft Dynamics Mobile Applications Group at MDCC.
IDC: Quantifying the return on investment from deploying mobility solutions in midsize businesses, 2006 (study sponsored by Microsoft)
MOBILITY
Did you know that only 15 percent of a company's employees actually use its ERP system? And that they are the people furthest from the action? What about the people who are face-to-face with customers, moving product, making sales? By making it mobile, using Pocket PCs, a much larger percentage of a company's workforce can plug into the system, enter data directly, retrieve exactly the Role-Tailored information that they need and take action instantly. In a broader perspective, this is particularly important as the mobile workforce is steadily growing, forecasted to account for more than 27 percent of the workforce – or 870 million people in 2009.
Source: AMR: The Enterprise Resource Planning Spending Report, 2005-2006.
TECHNICALLY SPOKEN
Microsoft Dynamics Mobile is a ready-to-use platform which integrates a combination of Windows Mobile, Microsoft Dynamics AX or NAV and new mobile versions of the Microsoft .Net Compact Framework and Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition.