Allied Waste Industries, Inc.
TRUX Data Consolidation and
Reporting
Industry: Waste Management &
Recycling
Focus: Business Intelligence, Information Management
Allied Waste Industries, Inc. (Allied),
headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, is the second largest
non-hazardous waste management company in the United States.
The company operates hundreds of collection companies, transfer
stations, landfills and recycling centers throughout eight
regions nationwide. The IT staff in Crestwood, Illinois is
responsible for information systems operations in the Central
region, and has national responsibility for scale site information
and reporting. Scale site data is entered at remote sites
into a third party billing system known as TRUX. A copy of
TRUX for each site is maintained on centralized servers in
Crestwood and accessed online via a Citrix network. There
are approximately 270 waste handling sites and 81 recyclable
material collection sites with individual TRUX environments
and databases currently on the network.
Allied has experienced rapid growth over the past several
years, and this trend is expected to continue with the addition
of a significant number of operating facilities. Historically,
there had been no capability to accurately report on summary
data from all of the collection sites. As Allied continued
to grow, the ability to report on consolidated TRUX system
data was becoming more important, yet more difficult. In addition,
as the recycling centers were added to the list of TRUX-based
sites, the Materials Marketing Group (MMG) needed to extract
data for ad hoc reports to facilitate the resale of recycling
materials collected.
Allied recognized the need to consolidate all TRUX data on
a nightly basis so Allied employees involved with monitoring
the overall activities at the collection centers would have
comprehensive reporting capabilities. Allied envisioned having
the standard reports published on a secure intranet so these
users would be able to view them using a Web browser. Similarly,
MMG users would be able to extract data and create their own
ad hoc reports using a third-party reporting tool such as
Access or Crystal Reports.
Allied called upon Genisys to help them implement their vision
for a TRUX reporting system. Genisys worked with Allied to
design, develop and implement a consolidation process to populate
a data warehouse with the data from current TRUX systems and
a reporting system to analyze this data. Genisys developed
a process using Data Transformation Services (DTS) to extract,
transform and consolidate DB3 files into a 16GB+ Microsoft
SQL Server 2000 data warehouse. On a nightly basis, this system
processes information on more than 2 million loads from Allied’s
65,000 customers. Genisys then developed an ad hoc reporting
tool by creating MDX queries against the data warehouse. The
reporting tool, which was developed using ASP, Microsoft Visual
Basic and Analysis Services for SQL Server 2000, is accessible
to all authorized users from Allied’s intranet.
The TRUX data consolidation and reporting solution has allowed
Allied to continue to pursue their strategy for growth, while
keeping them informed with the state of their business through
fast and accurate reporting on their various operating facilities.
Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft IIS,
Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2000,
Analysis Services, MDX Queries, Active Server Pages,
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