Evreka: Smart Waste Management with AI and SaaS

Waste collection is something most people don’t think about — until their trash doesn’t get picked up. For the municipalities and businesses that provide waste collection services, technology is critical for ensuring they don’t miss a customer. That accuracy avoids the expenses of sending trucks back out or issuing bill credits to soothe upset customers.

One example is a company that provides door-to-door residential waste collection services for tens of thousands of households in three Pakistan cities. The more its customer base grew, the more the company struggled to schedule pickups efficiently. Although the company had software to track each vehicle’s location, it still relied on its drivers to manually confirm that they stopped at each customer. As missed collections soared, so did the cost of fielding and resolving customer complaints.

Then the company found a waste management solution that dramatically increased productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction:

• Missed collections plummeted 89%.
• Managers spent 65% less time dealing with missed collections.
• Call center costs fell by 75%.
• Route optimization reduced operating expenses by 15%.

The solution was from Evreka, an Ankara, Turkey-based company specializing in software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for waste management. Evreka’s solutions leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to eliminate manual processes and enable more informed business decisions.

Evreka improves the whole waste process with highly innovative technology and environmentally friendly solutions with a platform that digitizes these operations with AI and machine learning to reduce costs, save time and increase citizen satisfaction. Through the technology that Evreka provides, the entire category of waste related operations is transformed into smarter ways.

Umutcan Duman, CEO of Evreka

Founded in 2015, Evreka has about 10,000 users in more than 40 countries across Europe, the Middle East, South America and Africa. Those customers also include organizations that provide donation drop-off boxes for charities. One example is Turkish Red Crescent, the country’s largest humanitarian organization, which implemented Evreka’s solutions to save 20 hours a month in operational planning and reduce collection time by 60%.

“We rarely encounter the analytics and the level of detail which Evreka provides on the undertaking of donation box operations,” Turkish Red Crescent said. “Thanks to Evreka, we have been managing the collection of donation boxes more efficiently through total time and distance reduction needed for the collection of donation boxes. Evreka has assisted us in managing the process of collection to create a more efficient system for society’s own sake. Evreka SaaS system made us notice a rare exception, like the robbery of donations, with a very smart solution that exceeds our expectations.”

End-to-End SaaS Insights Maximize Efficiency and Productivity

Evreka’s end-to-end solution has eight main components:

• Fleet management solution enables tracking of real-time locations of all vehicles in the fleet on the connected devices via Evreka Track and Evreka RFID. It facilitates a fast reaction opportunity for potential safety issues for drivers with SMS and email notifications, fuel management and better service for customers. Managers can check and analyze their fleet’s performance based on drivers, vehicles and time and manage the sources better. These insights help avoid problems such as breakdowns that would result in pickup delays.
• Operations management uses operational data and forecasts to optimize routes, save money by reducing fuel consumption and maximize each vehicle and crew’s productivity. Management is given full control over the operations. Managers can revise the tasks and reassign them anytime.
• Asset management enables managers to track all their assets, control the collection points, plans and missed bins situations in real time. With smart sensors embedded in the containers, the container’s location, fill level, movement and temperature can be tracked. Evreka provides suggestions for the most efficient resource allocation in the field and allows asset relocation accordingly. All the asset-related data is digitally stored on the Evreka Platform and can be processed anytime to analyze the efficiency of your resources.

• Employee management enables managers to manage their employees comprehensively. Employee weekly leave and working days can be viewed easily and digitally by the executives, and seamless communication can be achieved. Therefore, tasks can be assigned to the correct employee at the right time. Employee performance is measured and evaluated according to the management’s performance criteria. All data is stored and reported for the performance comparisons between employees retrospectively.
• Site management makes it easy to manage and analyze data collected from sites, stock and inventory situations, having full control over scaling, trading, claims, planning the demand and managing the price all in one place.
• Customer management covers the complete customer relations of your business. You can better understand your customer’s needs and expectations, improve your service quality and ultimately ensure absolute customer satisfaction.
• Citizen management makes authorities manage the citizens with communication, order & SLA & price & subcontract management features designed by Evreka. Besides, citizens are encouraged to participate in waste operations, and authorities can have full control over the requests and complaints arriving from citizens on a single screen.
• Finance management is designed and developed to meet the waste industry’s finance-specific requirements. It is an integrated multi-channel finance management system that widely delivers the latest developments in the industry regarding payment technology, proof of service, unit economics, security and compliance.

We are planning to continue our international expansion. In 2020, our priority is LATAM as we plan to generate several business partners in various countries of that region. Additionally, we are also focusing on Europe, especially west and northern Europe. We have ongoing trials with big enterprises over there.

Umutcan Duman, CEO of Evreka

Flexible IoT Solutions Enable Global Market Opportunities and Operational Savings

To enable their intelligent solutions, Evreka turned to Telit, which recommended its xL865 and xE910 series of cellular modules. Both module families are available in various versions supporting GSM/GPRS through the latest 4G technologies of LTE Cat M1, NB1 and NB2. That flexibility lets Evreka sell its solutions worldwide and switch between mobile operators.

Evreka chose to have those modules packaged with SIM cards and data plans from Telit. These two options are ideal for fast-growing, multinational companies such as Evreka because they eliminate the challenges of managing multiple SIMs and rate plans from numerous service providers. In the process, they also free Evreka to focus on other initiatives, such as developing innovative new solutions, expanding into additional markets and supporting its customers.

Evreka also selected Telit’s IoT Portal, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that streamlines and centralizes a wide variety of management tasks for devices, applications, connectivity, security and more.