Traditionally a logistics and transportation company, Waste Management handles more than just waste; it invests in an array of technologies that convert waste that would typically end up in landfills into a form that can be used or recycled. Waste Management sees itself as a customer-centric business, providing a wide variety of services for customers in the public, commercial property, manufacturing, and industrial sectors.

The company's many data sources and systems of record continue to grow through mergers and acquisitions. Several years ago, it started to combine its data sources to make it easier and faster for employees to find information.

"We needed to make sure that we could build the right data warehouse and have the right platform to showcase that information," said Herman Hsuan, director of growth and innovation. "This really starts with our source data and then the presentation layers that we need to provide information to our customers."

The company wanted to ensure that both the spreadsheets it received from customers, and those it created as a result of pushing information out of source systems, could be uploaded into a system and combined. The company also wanted the ability to easily create dashboards on the fly. It uses TIBCO analytics to access and visualize all of its information, mash-up different dashboards, and build new dashboards in seconds or minutes—reusing charts, tabs, and dashboards.

"TIBCO analytics continues to surprise us and help us stay ahead of the curve when it comes to providing technological innovations to our customers," said Hsuan.

With one source of data, and without having to spend time searching for information in multiple sources, Waste Management is able to better engage with customers over a longer period of time. Stakeholders across the company can see specific information on divisions, brands, or a filtered entity. Allowing customers to use Waste Management capabilities like a one-stop data shop and adding their own information to the data warehouse for more complete analyses has helped the company retain accounts and increase customer lifetime value.

"It's not just Waste Management data that could be here,” said Hsuan. "If customers had information around water or energy, or if it's a sustainability element that they were looking for, we could help them migrate some of that information into the warehouse and show it all in one place. The business impact from a sales standpoint has been incredible."

With TIBCO solutions, Waste Management has been able to grow its strategic alliances to better understand what new innovations to bring to customers. TIBCO's analytic insights provide the company with the information it needs to make suggestions and be proactive with customers while also helping them provide guidance.

"With TIBCO analytics, when you get into granular data, you can tell what's really happening in the operational footprint, and it really lends itself to a combination of process improvement and innovation," said Hsuan.

The TIBCO platform also provides the horsepower and flexibility Waste Management needed for its operations and customer management. Using TIBCO to take data from spreadsheets and transform it provides the company a significant improvement in operations. Because of this improvement, it is also able to take on more customers.

"I would say it's a 90 percent improvement in terms of speed," said Hsuan. "Along with that comes the accuracy and the ability for us to integrate data scrubbing and other elements to improve the overall process."

Waste Management staff will take what they've learned through TIBCO analytics and share findings across the company. "We have the ability, and also the responsibility, to externally share what we've learned across our company using business intelligence," said Hsuan. "And we have some really great examples of evangelization of what we’ve learned and how to consume and showcase it. It's been a great journey thus far, and I see that continuing."