Waste management company: Turning minutes into millions with Lexmark Optra IoT

Get accurate insights into site performance

This major landfill organization wanted to capture detailed site performance metrics, including logistics turnaround times, to get improved visibility of operations and identify continuous process improvements that could be easily scaled across its U.S.-wide operations.

Making use of existing infrastructure

By analyzing the current monitoring on-site, Lexmark realized that existing camera infrastructure could be used to avoid the need for large capital upfront investment. These video feeds of vehicle movements entering and exiting sites could provide the raw data that would in turn generate specific commercial insights, for example on vehicle throughput, waiting times and time spent at check in. Adding Lexmark’s Optra Edge hardware devices to the camera network enabled hi-res video feeds to be captured and processed locally. By transmitting only the relevant data to the management portal for analysis, Lexmark’s solution significantly reduced unnecessary network traffic and overcame any bandwidth or low latency issues to maintain uninterrupted data capture.

Defining the challenge

Traffic was backing up at a landfill organization’s facilities, causing delays in vehicle throughput and impacting operations. However, no data was available at the time that quantified the scope and scale of the issue, which in turn meant there was no solution to overcome it. Building on an existing relationship, Lexmark was able to bring its understanding of site operations to help define the best way to deliver the relevant data analytics — in the quickest and most cost-effective manner.

AI accuracy

Over 100,000 individual vehicle movements needed to be tracked every day. Vehicles using the facility were owned by a number of different operators, and tough environmental conditions meant a single, identifying data source — such as the license plate — could not be relied on to give the level of accuracy required. Lexmark’s AI application capability overcame this data integrity issue. Overlaying existing license plate tracking capability at entry and exit cameras with AI intelligence to capture additional identifying metrics — including make, color and model — created a much higher tracking accuracy, as well as more variables by which to analyze the data.