SFDC SA Drain

Progressive Waste Solutions and
the Force.com platform
From $2.9 billion to $5 billion in 36 months
Robert James Drain, Director IT Architecture Progressive Waste Solutions
Robert.drain@gmail.com

Progressive Waste Solutions was one of North America's largest full-service waste
management companies, providing non-hazardous solid waste collection, recycling
and disposal services to commercial, industrial, municipal and residential customers in
13 U.S. states and the District of Columbia and six Canadian provinces. It served
customers with vertically integrated collection and disposal assets. Progressive Waste
Solutions Ltd.'s shares were listed on the New York and Toronto Stock Exchanges
under the symbol BIN. In June 2016 Progressive Waste Solutions (PWS) was
acquired by Waste Connections (WC) out of the Woodland Texas.
After reviewing the entire technical stack used by PWS to manage everything from HR
to route management, the only technology chosen by WC to continue was the
solutions built on the force.com platform and other cloud based platforms.
About Progressive Waste Solutions

This is an industry made up of thousands of small independent haulers, a few regional companies and
four major National/International players. The top two in terms of revenue are Waste Management and
Republic Waste and the third was PWS.
The founders are all traditional ‘garbage’ men; business savvy, but do not see a high value in technology.
Even the large players have issues with any kind of spend on technology. The reason for this is simple;
this is a very capital intensive business, and money spent on technology is money not spent on a truck, or
a transfer station or a bin.
About the Garbage Industry

I’ve been involved in IT for over 25 years.
Started as a Programmer at the TD Bank back in 1991. Coded on CICS, and then dbase, PAL, VB, C etc:
As manager of App Services at TD CIBG we rolled the first major Siebel install in Canada in 1997.
Became Director of Web Technologies at TD in 1999.
Left TD in 2000 to join Siebel, worked in the financial and telecom verticals PS group.
Left Siebel to join a software startup in Toronto called Platform Computing and managed the IT Group
(Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft etc).
First started playing with SFDC back in 2007 as a possible replacement for Siebel.
In 2008 planned the deployment of SFDC at Platform computing which went live in 2009.
In 2010 IBM acquired Platform. I then joined IBM and looked at their professional services group.
In 2013 I left IBM for PWS to become their Director of IT Architecture.
In 2016 WC acquired PWS which brings me to my present position
About Me

• Large organization with disconnected sales and operations processes.
• No standard taxonomy, no way to measure sales and operational performance
• Poorly implemented CRM (third in less than a decade)
• The business ran on excel reports, could only look at the past, did not have a clear
line of sight into daily sales actions and was unable to forecast
• The VP of Sales and Sales Directors knew something had to change
• CEO tasked the CIO to ‘fix’ it.
• CIO understood that the existing IT group had gaps.
Where PWS was in 2013

…try not to spend a lot of money and get it fixed fast.
As the new Director of IT Architecture I started mapping out a new development
framework for PWS. I had a few simple guidelines to start with: html 5 UI (mobile first),
SOA design, make it secure, robust and scalable. The company would only use open
standards that were OS and browser agnostic.
I soon picked the force.com as my central platform even though the VP of Sales and
the Senior Director of Sales both did not like Salesforce.
Business Challenge : Get agreement that the go-forward platform was not MS
Dynamics, but salesforce.com.
IT Challenge: existing IT resources were all on premise (‘windows-shop’) and .Net
developers. They viewed the force, aws and ‘cloud’ with anxiety and/or suspicion.
The goal was simple, solve all the problems

The only reason why a CRM (or any IT large project) fails are the choices and decisions made in the past
were either wrong or sub-optimal.
The dilemma today is that with agile we no longer spend a large amount of time doing a waterfall designs.
The promise of agile is a faster path to productivity. But if you start before you know what the end is, how
do you actually start with confidence you can continue without hitting a wall?
The answer is simple. It is the tools and principles you decide upon before the first scrum session is held.
Tools: force.com and salesforce, (augmented with google, twilio and AWS).
Design principles: SOA with mule and restful. Don’t design every component to depend on other
components existing. Always push towards the standard OOB process prior to making changes. Assume
something will break. Only one API door to SF, Mule.
Development principles: Standard scrum agile to manage rollout. Make use of libraries: Common code
patterns should only exist once. Way easier to fix bugs and avoids the ‘easier to recode than figure out’
issue. Decide how the code executes, real time or batch, synchronous or asynchronous? Test, Test and
Test. 80% code coverage is the minimum acceptable goal per class.
Even if you don’t know what the end looks like, you need a path and a map
Why the upfront design matters

Get agreement on governance, IT cannot own process.
Standardize all development practices, down to minutia of how variables are named.
What does finished look like? Perfection is a rabbit hole, good enough will hurt you later on.
Understand a ‘need’ vs a ‘want’.
Decide what gets built in the force, and what is not.
For the not in the force pile, what is the best solution for accessing that data? (m?)SOA design.
Find the willing and golden developers in the IT department and convert them.
Don’t scare the rest.
Make sure the CIO understands what I am planning and budget accordingly.
Do not pretend to know everything.
Do not lie.
Deliver the promise.
In 2013 VB.net was the go to platform, fighting fires was the practice.
Standardize Development and build confidence in the force

Before a single line of code could be written the company needed to have a standard
practice around the way it operated. In the Banking and Software world this is normal
practice, but in the garbage world this was a new concept.
Prior to getting the stories, building the development backlog and planning the release
we started with Taxonomy. This, along with the sales process, had to be defined, and
every sales director needed to agree to the new way we’d run the business.
With SLT buy in, and a standard process framed out, we could then finally start to build
the stories.
Also, we didn’t make the mistake of not excluding sales reps as part of the design
process. We wanted to build for them, as well as for the SLT.
Standardize Processes and Taxonomy

The taxonomy document is still the bible for sales at the new company
Everybody speaks ‘salesforce’

Standardization of process + taxonomy was key
Worked with SMEs to map out what they do

I worked directly with all levels of business to plan, design and build out the solution
Design and Build

There are multiple lines of business, each different.
1. Commercial Services (ie.8 Yard bins at your local pizza place)
2. Equipment Sales (ie. bins, compactors etc)
3. Public Sector (ie.School districts, residential bids)
4. Construction (ie. temporary roll off, where revenue is short term and non-recurring)
5. Residential Temporary Roll Off (ie. similar to Construction)
6. Landfill Sales (ie.we sell our space to other similar businesses)
Each of the LOBs had to be mapped out individually. Some where 100% force, others were a mix of
force.com and AWS solutions, some that and Google.
I was directly involved at all stages from inception to release, simply because there were no resources
available until later in 2014.
This industry is surprisingly complicated
2014 Projects

7. Special Waste Sales (ie. we sell our space, and our skills to businesses that generate specialized
waste)
8. National and Broker Account (pure CRM)
Critical Data Points that need to be tracked
1. Contracts (Customer Service Agreements/CSA’s)
2. Services (the centroid of the site)
3. Mistakes and potential future losses
And support English, French and Spanish on three time zones.
….and not all English is the same, for example, bin vs. dumpster.
(Also users want outlook connect)
2014 Project – continued

Like SFDC the garbage industry ‘rents’ customers. Every relationship is time-bombed
by an agreement. Unlike SFDC, the industry is commoditized. A losing strategy is to
compete only on price. But a winning strategy means never losing a single deal
‘forever’. Always have a next step even when you lose.
Using salesforce and the force.com platform a sales process for commercial sales was
quickly (<6 months) developed and rolled out to 300+ sales reps and their
management team.
Reports and dashboards were created in the force, allowing the sales executives and
CxO’s to see in real time, on a TV at HQ, just how well things were going.
Organic sales growth became the one gold star that PWS had. The company had so
much organic growth in 2014 and 2015 it actually moved away from the standard
‘grow-by-buying’ model.
Growth Strategy through Organic Sales

Technology: Apex (actionpoller), AMCharts, visualforce
Refreshes every two minutes with new data and different charts and drives adoption.
HQ Dynamic Dashboard (Toronto and Woodlands offices)

By early 2014 the force had proven to work in regards to commercial new sales.
Another line of business, ‘Special Waste’ (very profitable but very complicated), was
selected to be put onto the force.
Special Waste would be waste such as dioxin, asbestos or anything contaminated that
cannot go into a standard landfill.
It is a complicated process in that there are layers of governmental regulations:
federal, state and local. Also, there are many agents in the business who are the
actual buyers, and what they’re doing is bidding out disposal and transfer to other
players including PWS.
The challenge was to ensure all the required information was captured, that the
locality was captured and mapped, the disposal site was mapped, the regulations
pertaining to movement of the waste from the site to the final landfill was mapped and
every single rule regarding that movement was known. The liability issues made this a
paper intensive and slow process. Worse, often things got missed leading to costly
backfilling.
Special Waste

In Spring 2014 we met with SMEs in Texas to get a full understanding of the needs.
It was decided to use force.com and Salesforce Communities to setup a portal to allow
the agents to log in and submit their request directly to PWS.
With the data submitted, we’d use the google api to geocode all points, and then
isolate the business rules needed to get approval.
We used force.com workflow and approval workflow to track everything, and in the
end we used Conga and Docusign to create and manage the required legal
documents.
WC sold this app to WasteBits in July 2016.
Special Waste - Solved

Generally PWS can service almost any commercial business within it’s service territory. Collecting and
managing this data was bothersome but necessary. Like any sales pipeline you need a lead pipeline to
feed your opportunities.
PWS needed as many leads as it could get, and a process to validate them to feed the pipeline.
Leads

Leads have a value based on their physical location; can we service them? The business wins on density
and so the other question is, which addresses around this lead do we service already?
PWS integrated into salesforce lead generation sources such as CoStar, Hoovers and REED
construction. These third parties would feed in leads daily. (tools used, jitterbit and mule). National
Accounts used these tools in conjunction with data.com to validate large accounts with many sites.
Mobile Sales Reps had a force.com app integrated with google (places) that allowed them to see
customers and leads and prospects and quickly add them as a lead. We automatically rated all leads
based on their density (google map api and location-based soql) and the completeness of the profile.
Our lead pipeline fed the commercial new business pipeline and organic sales increased.
All that data….dupes
The automatic lead data, plus the user input data was of course creating a problem. The solution we
examined in 2014 was CRM Fusion and data.com, and a new dedicated resource to own the data, and
clean it up. This was budgeted for 2015 but never rolled out simply because the company didn’t see
value in clean data or DQM as a whole.
Leads – full integration

Customer: Sales Reps
Technology: Apex, visualforce, google map api, mule (to TRUX database)
Mobile Mapping Tool

By mid 2014 salesforce and the force were in a nice place at PWS and it was decided to use the
force.com to build out processes that were mainly excel driven. PWS contacted SFDC and started to buy
force.com licenses to roll these tools out. The new tools included:
1. A CSA audit tool (using AWS S3 to save a secure copy of the CSA as a pdf)
2. A site safety review form (using google maps) to allow mobile users to complete the view of any site.
3. A Bin Inventory tracker (integrated to geoTab output) and forecast report based on sales.
4. A tool to track all Operational reporting minutes and to dos (the MOR tool)
5. A tool to track the sales organization in a hierarchy, from the office to the employee
6. There were others, mostly one-offs that were built then used, then shut down.
By early 2014 we had another FTE force developer, and in the spring of 2015 we hired another.
Using force.com as a PaaS

PWS was actually starting to have issues fulfilling the new sold services to the new customer. New large
customers were asking for portals and reports that the hauling systems could not manage.
PWS decided to begin tracking all issues using salesforce service desk. A pilot was rolled out using
web2case and several districts went live.
Portlets were built in the force.com that used mule to link the force to legacy hauling systems and display
the information on demand. This includes existing services, missed pickups, operational reports and
notes.
A process to manage cancellations was built on top of salesforce in the hopes of saving customers as well
as isolating routes that are stressed.
2015 – focus on the customer

Customer: City of Hialeah, FL. Value $2MM USD/annual
Technology: Apex, visualforce, google map api, mulesoft (to TRUX database)
Hialeah Residential Portal

A review of the reporting capabilities in the force was done, and a decision was made to integrate
force.com to Sisense instead of Wave. The newest force.com developer was a trained BI person, and
they quickly built out dashboards, pulling in data directly from salesforce and other sources (via mule) to
give the SLT a visual view of the companies operating status. Cognos was the primary BI tool but we
decided that visualization was better than data (as proven in our use of the force) and so we built out a
series of operating dashboards to track:
1. New Commercial Sales
2. Landfill Sales (salesforce vs. gate revenues)
3. Special Waste Sales (salesforce vs. gate revenues)
4. Cancellation Issues (heat map)
5. Service Issues (district and heat map)
6. Hauling Route Reports, Safety Dashboards
7. Profitability of each salesforce win
WC has also decided to keep Sisense. They’re not keeping Cognos.
2015 – metrics and tracking

KPIs Data Visualization
Website Google Ranking

With simple SSO Sisense is able to mashup KPIs inside of SFDC
KPIs Data Visualization (con’t)

In late 2014 a review of our website and all things web was undertaken. The goal was to get our google
rankings up, and create a website that had a call to action, “get a quote!”.
The website had never been a priority to the company and our Google rankings reflected that.
I decided to completely redo it from scratch. First I worked with Google to understand how to get our
rankings up (how do Adwords work, and what is Organic search). Next I moved the site to an AWS EC2
site, with CloudFlare and EasyDNS for a very cost effective, secure and reliable website.
We built custom force.com pages that would be publically displayed (sites) that integrated critical bits of
our website to salesforce. We integrated those again to google to allow geocoded pages to be delivered
to the customer. We also integrated the force with Twilio, LiveChat and Google Adwords to allow districts
to manage their own campaigns and 1-800 numbers and customer online experience.
Later in 2015 we integrated web2case.
In 2016 WC has decided to dump their website and port over to the PWS website and all its features.
Web and Web2Lead

Website Integration
Technologies: Salesforce, force.com, sites, liveChat, google, AWS EC2
The above is all 100% managed in the force.com platform

CSAs are the only protection the company has between being profitable and being a charity.
It is critical that all CSAs are correctly signed, and follow the precise protocol with the correct T&Cs.
Issue: all CSAs were paper based, and sales reps simply wrote in changes. Often these changes voided
the actual agreement. Overtime CSAs were lost, which meant we could not hold the client to the T&Cs.
Business Need: Get the rep to complete a signed CSA, with all the proper T&Cs, and have all the
services and pricing and contact data come from the salesforce record that drives the pipeline.
Secondary Need: workflow to fire when the contract is signed, closing the opportunity and alerting
management.
Benefit: better pipeline values, and we can capture the metadata of the CSA and use it in the future.
Issue: PWS did not want to use a solution such as DocuSign for standard sales reps because they simply
did not wish to spend the money on a third party tool.
Secondary Issue: Sales Reps have a limited right to modify T&Cs, Managers have more rights. However
both cannot change all T&Cs without contact HQ.
Mini Case Study
The eCSA Project

Mini Case Study
The eCSA Project

Rolled out in Toronto and Ajax in early Spring 2016 after final approval by Legal.
Rolled out to Rest of Canada late Spring 2016.
Plans to roll out to USA (under the WC brand) in September 2016.
Template Driven, so when CSAs change the system can quickly adapt to those changes.
Finally we are paperless.
Meta Data on Terms can be used to funnel customers under price / fee restrictions.
Actual signatures are transient, and so not saved.
Copies of signed eCSAs (pdf format) are attached to the opportunity and emailed to users.
This is a 100% force.com application, no third party tools are involved.
Works on iOS, Mac, PC and android
Operations calculated the savings on paper alone at almost 100K in the first year.
The cost of managing paper CSAs is unknown at the company, but estimated at $100 per piece.
Mini Case Study
The eCSA Project

In late 2015 I opened up discussions with salesforce.com to get PWS on boarded as a Thunder trial
customer.
How can IoT solve a garbage business problem?
Simple, the service is all based on logistics. Historically the data is compiled at the end of the route and
only then are problems known.
In 2014 the hauling operations group started replacing the fleetmind in-cab solution with GeoTab, and one
of the benefits of GeoTab is that it could communicate to an inexpensive android based tablet. Working
with GeoTab we managed to get the data about the truck to stream back to an ODS for reporting.
But Thunder would allow us to setup rules and real-time actions based on streaming data.
• Is a truck moving too fast? Alert the driver to slow down.
• Is a truck far off route? Alert dispatch.
• Is a truck NOT moving? Alert dispatch.
• Is the truck within a circle of expected locality? Warn dispatch about late pickups.
Had we not been acquired
2016 and beyond

Mashup Mainia
2016 Salesforce ‘has’ all the data

Between mid 2013 and late 2015 I was directly involved in the evolution of a large company’s use of
technology. When I joined, I told the CEO that I could architect his entire company to run in the cloud
using a lego-style design philosophy with force.com as my core.
Why did I make these decisions? It’s simple, when you design anything you need to focus on different
lines of importance based on the audience. Technically you need security, stability and the ability to scale.
The business needs predictable, reliable and cost effective solutions. You also need to manage risk, look
forward to a mobile world and you need a framework that allows you to be very nimble. Force.com met
these needs. If I couldn’t built it in the force, I knew I could build it outside the force and easily integrate
the other solution.
I bet my career that I could do this at PWS, that I could deliver on all counts. I was right. When I met with
the new CEO and CIO of the merged company I didn’t need to argue my case, I simply showed them
what we’d done with a small pool of resources. The new merged company (Waste
Connections/Progressive Waste Services) is now the third largest waste company in the world and they’re
building forward on the force.com and all the other technologies I put in place.
Why we made all these choices?

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