GManage recycling when no one has access to the recycling bins

The coronavirus crisis has had major repercussions on a global scale. From the economic shock resulting from a major financial crisis to social disruption and citizen unrest in this “new normal”. However, there are consequences of the pandemic that have not enjoyed the same media repercussion despite sharing their degree of importance, as is the case of sustainability and recycling.

An adverse effect throughout this prolonged pandemic year has been the strong demand for single-use products (mostly plastic), such as gloves, masks or protective screens, among others. The increase in this type of waste has skyrocketed and even today they pose a difficult problem of environmental unsustainability.

The decomposition of such waste in a sustainable manner has become an arduous task, since energy expenditure is high in addition to producing high polluting emissions in the incineration process. This, added to the already prevalent problem of “climate unsustainability”, could easily have led us to think of a real environmental disaster on a global scale. However, according to sources such as Eldiario.es, state that an adverse effect of the pandemic has been increased environmental awareness and an increase in domestic recycling.

According to this medium, more quantity is currently being recycled compared to previous “pre-pandemic” years, in addition to other types of hitherto invisible waste, such as those mentioned above, are also recycled. In this way, everything suggests that commitment to the environment, despite suffering such a dramatic situation as COVID-19, has occurred in an increasingly firm custom in homes, thus becoming a practice of irrepressible promotion.

And why the other heroes of the pandemic? Because despite the exponential growth in terms of environmental awareness, dealing with the pandemic situation has not been easy for recycling companies. There have been exceptional situations, as has occurred in some homes and surroundings in Chile, where it has not been possible to have suitable points to be able to recycle properly (the appropriate recycling containers were not available), which made it difficult to carry out this practice. This, together with the inconvenience of the strictest home confinement stages, posed a great challenge. Taking into account this problem, companies such as Chile Rembre have been able to find a solution. Thanks to your proposal S.O.S. Rembre, managed to overcome the obstacles of the pandemic by facilitating the practice of recycling thanks to their home waste collection service. The sole responsibility of the users who participated in this initiative was, solely, to collect all those containers or waste that could be recycled, such as cardboard, plastics, metals and glass.

Given the significant growth in operations, as each family had to visit practically door-to-door, Rembre was forced to look for a tool that would help them plan their waste collection routes more efficiently. Smartmonkey.io Planner it has allowed them to efficiently, quickly and safely manage all routes, reducing routes, fuel consumption and emissions by more than 30%, helping to have even more efficient and environmentally friendly operations. Without a doubt, a solidarity project committed to the environment that has made this crisis a more livable world.

This health crisis has shown us the importance of being able to count on a more sustainable world that must be preserved. Therefore, simple gestures such as the practice of recycling or improving the efficiency of last-mile operations can represent the necessary change towards a better planet.

We encourage you to recycle a little more and to improve the efficiency of your last mile operations in a simple way and completely free of charge with Routal Planner.

Today we bring an article that fills us with pride, we are very grateful to have met the team of Savinco and to be able to do our bit to the incredible social impact project that they are carrying out in Peru and Ecuador.

The case of Savinco Social Finance and how they create better futures in Latin America:

Most residents of rural areas of these countries face 3 problems when managing their income, the first is that There is no habit of saving which translates into a constant vulnerability because it does not generate a fund that they can access in the face of any need. The second problem is that, due to their low incomes and poor economic stability, banks and other financial institutions They deny the delivery of credits, but even when they do, we come to the third problem, which is the lack of financial education so this credit can cause more difficulties than solutions.

The mission of Savinco is to improve the quality of life of families through financial inclusion, they achieve this by providing a comprehensive solution that directly attacks the 3 problems mentioned, the first thing they do is form groups of between 15 and 40 people that function as a support network that meets once a month. These groups receive training on how to manage their finances by qualified coaches, at each monthly meeting of the group Savinco receives savings from each of the members and provides them with access to credit with better conditions than the market.

To manage all this, they use their technology. Qmobile a software that allows users to track their progress, their money movements and, above all, to make the entire process transparent.

The project of Savinco It bears the name of “Save to learn” and it opens the door for these people to achieve financial independence, but how big is this project?

These are currently the numbers:

The most surprising thing about these numbers is that they weren't enough for Savinco, they were still determined to provide more tools to their groups and decided to create Savinco Rural, a platform that operates in Ecuador to sell products between its groups. They carry tomatoes, lemons, passion fruit, corn and even honey that they buy in some groups to resell in others, creating their own market and boosting income capacity among their members.

This is when it comes in Routal, with hundreds of different locations for each group and more than 19,000 members, it became very difficult to manage product shipments and movements. Our software allowed you to Savinco optimize their daily routes in order to reach more people and bring smiles where there were none before.

We invite you to follow this beautiful project on:

https://savinco.org/
https://savincorural.com/
https://www.facebook.com/SavincoEcuador‍

If you too have a social project that you think we can contribute to, don't hesitate to contact us!

Managing deliveries is a jungle, but there are cases where there is light at the end of dense and dense nature. Today we will talk about one of them and how they managed to solve the problems they faced when launching a new division focusing on last-mile offices.

Alfil Logistics Success Story:

Alfil Logistics is a company with 20 years of experience in the market, manages more than 300,000 shipments annually and has more than 400 employees. They had the objective of growing through a new service that would offer a comprehensive logistics solution for e-commerce and decided to do so through a new division that they called Alfilxpress.

El 95% of Alfilxpress deliveries were to private homes, this was the first problem since the systems they had been using were not optimal for last-mile transportation. Another weak point they had was that they did not have real-time information about their offices and what they did have was in different systems.

In addition to these problems, they had a high staff turnover as they handled high peaks in demand and had little time to plan their routes every day. This is how their exhaustive search for a solution began to help them optimize their service, enrich information and improve decision-making.

When they started using Routal they saw an improvement of a 15% of productivity in their delivery companies, they managed to reduce the number of vehicles they used in Barcelona, improved the quality of information and thus reduced multiple errors (such as constant problems they had with delivery addresses).

15% improvement in productivity

One of the big headaches of shipping management is failed deliveries, Alfilxpress I managed to reduce them considerably thanks to the fact that our platform offers a system to notify consumers that their package is close to arriving and also allows us to link addresses with the delivery time windows selected by customers.

Another great advantage is that now Alfilxpress you can track your vehicles live, see the comments of each incident and be able to react quickly to any unforeseen event, all thanks to the visibility we provide on our platform.

Just like Alfilxpress, hundreds of customers are discovering the benefits and tools it offers Routal to be able to cross the jungle of deliveries.

We hope this article was useful to you and if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us!

In this article, we'll talk about what roundabouts and organizations have in common.. Let me start with the obvious differences:

• Un roundabout is a road construction designed to facilitate traffic flow at intersections that cross roads.
• Una organization is an administrative structure and administrative systems created to achieve goals or objectives with the support of people themselves, or with the support of human talent or other similar characteristics.

The question is:

What do a roundabout and an organization share?

Before we can answer that question, we need to understand its use. In Europe, the use of roundabouts is widespread (25,000 in the United Kingdom, 50,000 in France, etc.). In recent decades, its implementation has grown a lot. The reasons are obvious: They reduce the number of accidents, improve the speed of passage, reduce pollution and are cheaper to maintain.

Different scientific studies have demonstrated the benefits and benefits of Roundabouts front traffic lights (traffic lights go...). The question that one can ask is why a country like the United States has barely 7,000 roundabouts, when in terms of surface area and inhabitants it far exceeds all European countries?

The answer lies in the fear of change. Everyone knows how a traffic light works (even my 4-year-old daughter knows when it can pass). Our decisions behind the wheel in front of a traffic light are automatic, requiring no mental effort. On the other hand, venturing into a roundabout requires maximum concentration to avoid a collision. I still remember learning to drive and having to go through the big and dreaded Plaça Espanya Barcelona, it was almost like going into hell... and I think it still is for many drivers.

Fear of change usually causes an opinion contrary to a new proposal (no matter how many studies say that the change will improve some aspect). This reasoning sometimes reminds me of our sector, logistics. Not infrequently do we encounter people within organizations who, because of this fear of change, are unable to see the potential for improvement of a new tool or process.

Oddly enough, the opinion of the population regarding the construction of a roundabout and the use of route optimization tools are very similar. The percentage of people against building a roundabout ranges from 60%-80%. A number similar to the number of companies that decide that they are not interested in saving logistics costs by 30% through a route optimization solution such as Routal.

Imagine getting through the first call, convincing the management team and the head of operations. Queda the difficult task of convincing the end user. The one who may view your solution with suspicion and disbelief. The question that person usually asks is the following: “A tool that will make my life easier, make my work 30% more efficient than me and save me an hour a day on something as complicated as route planning? I know who will be the next to go to the strike lists...

The fear of change, combined with a fear of losing a job, generates a very high aversion to change. I don't blame them, it's natural and it perfectly fulfills the saying of “Little Virgin, little virgin, let me stay as I am”, or what is usually said in the world Tech,”If it works, don't touch it”.

In any case, I think that in a world as changing as the current one, with competition always on our heels, doing things the same way, because it has always been that way, is much more dangerous than starting to improve processes and use new tools and technologies. With clear common sense, but in the Long Run, I think or do organizations evolve and adapt or die out.

I think that is one of the main risks for organizations: The lack of talent in their teams that leads companies to not know how to adapt to new changes and condemns them to extinction. Xavier Marcet explains very well in just a minute.

In conclusion, companies able to adapt to changes, manage the talent of their teams and know how to manage change are much more likely to survive in an environment as changing and uncertain as the current one.

Xavier Ruiz — CEO

Post inspired by Freakonomics Ep 454 Roundabouts

Sant Jordi is always a special day, books, roses, queues and people, lots of people. Everyone is out on the street, enjoying a magical day for both children and adults. It is the day of the year when the most books are sold, 7.5% of annual sales In the city of Barcelona.

This year will be special. We'll have to spend it at home, enjoying a good read, our recommendation for these days The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. This year we will save ourselves the hassle of Las Ramblas and we will have to buy the roses online. Without a doubt, a special year.

We want to take advantage of this important date to see the success of initiatives that, in a normal year, would hardly have achieved such overwhelming success.

One of our customers Santjordiacasa.com is using Highway as a tool to optimize the distribution of roses on such a special date as Sant Jordi.

Thanks to the power of the Highway route planner, they have been able to grow in deliveries and reach customers that would have been impossible for them before.

Like them, hundreds of other customers are entering a world such as home delivery. A channel that had often been completely forgotten. Thanks, or unfortunately, COVID-19 has forced the launch of new marketing channels such as Ecommerce and its own distribution and home delivery.

We are seeing this in our traditional customers, distribution companies to the HORECA channel that are converting to home distributors overnight.

Pastry shops such as Cropics they were able to deliver all the Easter monkeys in record time and have the detail of leaving a monkey at my wife's grandmother's house 😁. These types of details make being able to help small businesses make you proud of the work you do and of seeing how you can help more people around you.

We are in a very difficult time for many companies and families. There is little help to get through this crisis and reaching those people we can help is always a challenge. I encourage you to share our story, the story of our users and customers, companies that are embarking on a new adventure, delivery. Without experience, without processes, but with a desire to fight and face the corona, you are not alone.

We won this together.

The distribution on demand is an industry that is growing at a very high speed. New companies appear every day, especially in the market for food, beverages and deliveries of perishable products. And the competition is wild. Efficiency is a key metric in the “I want it all and I want it now” era and the most critical part is what happens from when a new order is placed until it is delivered.

Today I want to focus on the problem of sending new orders, that is, how to decide which courier service the order should be assigned to when an order enters the system. This is because the dispatch today is not addressed systematically. Optimizing the dispatch system can minimize delivery time and improve customer satisfaction.

The operating paradigm of companies that deliver on demand can be divided into two different types:

1. Operations based on a single warehouse are those operations focused on a single tank. This warehouse has several dealers and the programming is done once to obtain an order list; usually grouping orders by area. Amazon Prime is a good example of this paradigm.
2. Operations based on multiple warehouses are those operations that rely on choosing the order in one of the multiple warehouses and delivering it to a customer. In this case, the delivery people are scattered around the city, and once a new order arrives, it is assigned through a shipping process to one of the multiple delivery people. Companies such as Uber, Just Eat, Delivero, etc. operate this way.

The problem of dispatching is solved more or less satisfactorily in the first scenario thanks to the possibility of linking together a list of deliveries and considering it as a Traveling Seller Problem (Traveling Salesman Problem) with some pre-clustering restrictions (OK, I know that TSP is an expensive problem, but... come on, it's about Amazon).

On the contrary, in the second scenario, it is not so clear that the problem is being optimally addressed. How can a new incoming order be added to a running scenario? There are tons of variables to consider:

• Can the courier make multiple collections before starting to deliver?
• Can an already assigned order be reassigned to another courier service?
• Do all orders have the same priority? (for example, all orders must be delivered no later than 30 minutes after placing them)
  Do orders need to be delivered by a particular vehicle?
• ...

Modeling this scenario can be quite challenging, and that's why SmartMonkey has been working on this problem for a while. We call our solution Online Programming Optimization Model (OSOM) (Yes, branding isn't one of our strengths 😅, but phonetically it sounds like “incredible” and that's pretty fun). OSOM can model business restrictions and find a feasible solution to the dispatching problem.

In the simulation below, we have modeled a world where:

• A courier service can be assigned multiple pickups and deliveries at the same time
• and the first next service of each messaging service is fixed and cannot be reassigned in subsequent iterations.

The visualization contains twenty iterations of the world divided into two steps:

1. New incoming services are marked in gray.

2. Services are dynamically assigned to deliverers to optimize overall delivery time.

I want to share a personal experience that matters. Smartmonkey.io is headquartered in Barcelona, the second region with the most Coronavirus infections in Spain. The second worst country in the world that is dealing with this virus.

Hospitals in our area are about to be overwhelmed by the demand for ICU patients. According to friends who work in hospitals, the capacity of ICU beds in the region of Catalonia is about 800 beds, of which 600 are currently occupied. But we are still a long way from the top. Studies suggest that it will be at the end of April . Even so, 4 long weeks with the exponential growth of infections and expected deaths. Tragedy is the smallest word we could find to define this situation.

But it's not all darkness and death. A few days ago, a guy from Canada was starting to use Highway, our route optimizer. Use was normal for new customers, Testing the examples , taking their first small steps in a very powerful tool, but at the same time easy to put into operation.

We always like it talk to our new users . Not only is it very useful to know more about them, but being able to provide the best possible customer service is priceless. Sometimes you find incredible projects behind @gmail .com accounts like Ahmed Sagarwala's father-in-law in Canada.

It is helping not only the poor, but also people who have decided to isolate themselves to prevent the spread of the virus. Delivering medicines to these people is not just worrying about them, but doing everything they can for society. We are very proud that yesterday 16 people received help thanks to Ahmed's father-in-law and Highway. He told us that next week it will increase to 50 or more. We'll be here helping them.

If you read this and know someone, we could help. Spread the word. We know how difficult it can be, #quédateEnCasa and support Ahmed and others around the world.

Xavi Ruiz, CEO of Routal

‍

We are at war. Wars tend to happen far from home. But now, all of humanity is fighting (or will fight very soon) from their own homes. Follow public health guidelines such as #quedateencasa it will make us win. There are not enough hospital beds to process the demand generated by the Coronavirus. No country is prepared for such an increase in demand for critical patients. Then doctors have to choose who lives and who dies. If you don't want to play Russian roulette, my advice is to stay home. You'll reduce your chances of playing a very dangerous game these days.

Why isn't this just a health issue?

This thread is causing people to change their normal patterns. In many countries, fear causes irrational decisions to be made. We've seen people buying toilet paper for the rest of their lives. Fear causes people to act in ways we couldn't imagine. Fear saved us for the last few million years from being eaten by a lion. Fear will save us (Spanish).

The good thing about this crisis is that people are realizing the importance of the supply chain in their lives. Without trucks there is no toilet paper. That can't happen, period. But in a period of time when demand increases, normal ways of doing logistics tend not to meet the necessary demand.

These moments require help, which requires tools that make warehouse life easier, more reliable and able to adapt to unforeseen events that will surely happen again. The real question is when this will happen again. We just have to start getting used to it.

It's all a logistical problem.

It's not just supermarket logistics that are important. But healthcare logistics are key to maintaining human life expectancy. We're talking about compliance with basic materials, from whey to pills to laundry. Hospitals are complex production lines where people come in sick and come out cured.

A few weeks ago I was talking to one of the innovation managers of the ICS (Institut Català de la Salud — Catalan Institute of Health) on the future of hospitals. He told me that hospitals as we understand them today are going to change a lot. There is a huge tendency in the healthcare field to move patients from large and expensive hospitals, where they tend to stay for longer periods, to their homes as quickly as possible. Not only because it's cheaper for public health (40% savings) but because studies show that Staying home improves people's recovery

These benefits create a new logistical challenge. Make your healthcare team mobile. The main difference between a delivery company and Hospitality at Home is the cost of employees. The cost of a driver is relatively cheap, but a medical team comprised of a doctor, a nurse, and medical supplies is not comparable. Thus, every minute you can save them, in their trips, planning... is a minute in which you can treat more patients. Productivity isn't going to be like having them at the hospital door next to the door, but as much as we can optimize their routes, the less they're going to waste travel.

But how does Routal fight against COVID-19?

Like any good story, we have the bad guy: the coronavirus. The good ones: medical equipment. The problem is that the bad guy is winning the battle. The secret weapon: Routal . If you don't know us, we help companies with last-mile logistics processes optimize their routes while learning how their operations behave to improve operations the next day. Our goal is to make your last-mile operations as efficient and realistic as possible to make appropriate decisions. We have a mantra:

Machines solve problems, humans make decisions

The Hospital at Home teams from Hospital Sant Joan de Déu they are fighting this villain. Our technology allows them to focus on what's important: treating their patients in the best possible way while protecting others from infection by staying at home. We take care of your planning, making it as efficient as possible in seconds.

We're simply going to win this war.

If we stay at home

Winning a war has never been easier

Do you want to know more? Request a demo in our chat and we'll show you how to improve your operations by up to 30%

Get a demo and start beating COVID-19

Open innovation is becoming an established trend among all corporations. If you're a corporation and don't have an open innovation contest, this means you're missing out on the next wave of changes that could cause your current business to die sooner than expected.

Volkswagen understood that and recognized that finding the best innovations that benefit its business will probably have to come from outside the company, which is why it launched its open innovation competition in which +400 startups were present and from which we were selected to be among the top 10 innovators in logistics.

Top 10 logistics innovators of 2019

The selection process was challenging: We had to go through different departments of the Volkswagen logistics group in addition to their factories, talking to their employees, trying to understand their needs and complaints and adapt them to our technology. In the end, they selected the 10 best companies that will directly impact their logistics operations and on May 14, SmartMonkey will be at the IPM logistics innovation event with the rest of the winners. This represents an honor for us and we would like to thank Volkswagen for this great opportunity.

But for now, the question I want to discuss is:
“Do all corporations need an open innovation contest?”

From my point of view, I would say no. Most companies are not yet ready for this disruptive field, not even their top managers! Because to be involved in innovation, you must first believe in its essence, from top to bottom; from the CEO to the lowest level of responsibility. This means that everyone must be willing to allocate a budget, efforts and resources and especially to receive the FAIL with open hands because innovation will inevitably cause people to fail, if that's not the case then maybe you're not innovating.

Failure is part of the game. Talk to Edison and his 999 ways not to make a light bulb. If top management is a firm believer in innovation, then innovation must be part of the company's culture. Once achieved, people will give more of their time and themselves to bring their best ideas to the company, even if there is a risk of failure. From the bottom up, innovation comes when employees believe in that culture.

There are a lot of examples that illustrate this, but there is only one that struck me personally: In Aigües de Barcelona; In the water service company that is part of the Suez group, there was that man who spent several weekends of his free time working at home, designing a tool to open sewers so that he wouldn't get hurt by repetition. He was one of their foremen, so he served as a role model for the rest of the employees to begin to innovate and provide new ideas that would improve their lives. The company believed in him, in his ambition and in his idea, and even dedicated resources to developing it, testing it and putting it into practice to encourage others to start taking initiatives as well.

Companies where failure is not accepted, in which people simply do what they are supposed to do, in which no one is taking risks, are in danger: their jobs are at risk, not because they are going to be fired, but because the market is not waiting for anyone. It's a matter of time and changing the inertia of companies over several years is no easy task.

SmartMonkey has been in numerous corporate open innovation competitions of different types: Aigües de Barcelona, Heineken, Cofares, Volkswagen, to name just a few and what I can tell you from my own experience, this is one of the ways to start working with open innovation. Innovation: While investors are looking for the unicorn, trying to fill their transaction flow, companies have the same difficult task; it takes time and it's very difficult to see potential matches between corporations and startups, but someone must do it. So my personal advice for senior management will be to assign one of the most experienced people in the company; someone with the big picture in mind, someone who knows the internal processes perfectly or at least has experience in several departments, to be responsible for the fit between the company and the startups. You need to be a leader, be reliable and be on good terms with other employees because you will ask for help, ask for favors or have to cut through internal bureaucracy. Give that person support and innovation will appear.

Last but not least, my last tip is for startups: if you don't know people from operations but only see people from marketing or communication departments, RUN (unless your products and services solve marketing problems). Sure, they'll convince you because of the amount of possibilities you have, but trust me, this is just to illustrate, they don't plan to do any business behind those meetings, they just do it because they should. I call that “The entrepreneurial show business” — “The entrepreneurial show”. So, believe me, don't waste time and run.