In this case, the Council was planning a phased rollout of separate food collections to all households, in 10 phases spread over a year. This was to be incorporated alongside a well established collection regime. Initial work by CH2 and the Council’s implementation team discovered that the base data (based on the Corporate Address Gazetteer – CAG) was not fully up-to-date, and a lot of preparatory work was necessary to clean and cross-check property entries for each collection before the final master dataset could be signed off.
This experience highlighted a significant benefit of using the CH2 calendar system – that of independent review and validation of base data, before any calendars are sent out or proposed new rounds are put in place. The value of this checking stage became clear at roll-out: the initial phases have gone very smoothly with very little remedial work or calendar re-issues required despite the earlier difficulties with the CAG. The final phase will be rolled out in the summer of 2014.
As the Council was not able to predict in advance the arrangements for Christmas and New year collections they chose to use a feature of the CH2 system that can outline collections on public holidays. This allows these collections to be highlighted on the calendar telling householders to check the media / websites for updated collection information, to be published nearer the time.
This case is also notable for the use of complex shape and colour codes for collections that happen on the same day. The system assigns shapes, codes and colours based on the component collections, but editing tools allow modifications to edit the text (to be shown on the key), the shapes and the codes for maximum legibility. It is also possible to substitute new symbols and colours instead of a combination shape if this would be easier to read.
An example of some of the combination codes and shapes that could be used for this set of calendars is shown in the table.