We’re cutting food waste with the help of a new system which had been developed by our very own in-house tech-wizard!

Prior to the new system, staff were printing forms off for each ward, hand writing the waste results onto the sheets. Then every month, someone had to gather all the forms from around the company and total them all with a calculator, which could be tricky between reading different handwriting and adding up so many figures! This was very time consuming and wasted a great deal of paper, which was counter intuitive since we are recording and monitoring our waste to try and save to reduce our carbon footprint and our impact on climate change.

Facilities Project Manager, Darren Foster, has developed new electronic forms to be used by staff on iPads they had already been issued, easily accessed by icons placed on the devices. Once the form has been completed by simply using dropdowns and fields to choose the location it automatically shows the correct fields required to input the information required.

Once submitted, a computer program calls an automation, which is based in the cloud, sees that a measurement is submitted, checks that it’s been correctly inputted. Once checked, the data is moved into a database and the person submitting the form receives and email, thanking them, or if it’s incorrect, it sends them an email advising why the information isn’t correct and that they need to re-submit it.

The database is then used to create a Dashboard with reports using both charts and tables, which performs all of the calculations automatically. They are then shared using Teams, this means that anomalies in waste can be easily identified, and the relevant staff can investigate why the waste is being generated.

Darren has saved the Company money and staff time by using the technology and software we already owned to streamline this process, and also made our recordings of food waste more accurate!