Joint Waste Solutions (JWS) develops countywide initiatives on behalf of the Surrey Environment Partnership (SEP) which aims to increase recycling, reduce waste and tackle other environmental issues. SEP includes the 11 district and borough councils that collect waste and recycling in Surrey and the county council, which is responsible for disposing of it.
The JWS team also manages a joint waste, recycling and street cleaning contract in Elmbridge, Mole Valley, Surrey Heath and Woking. The contract covers all aspects of waste collection and street cleaning, and is saving around £2.5 million a year while maintaining high quality services.
JWS was formed by combining teams from five different councils and staff employed by the Surrey Environment Partnership. It was essential to co-locate the majority of the team at a single office location and Dukes Court in Woking was chosen.
Communicate was introduced to the company by the Dukes Court facilities management company Property Initiatives, to tender for the work to install fast, secure and reliable Wi-Fi infrastructure to ensure seamless use of off-site servers.
Communicate was chosen to help JWS to work alongside its relocation project management team. In addition, an upgraded firewall and web filtering were recommended to ensure better management and security.
Matt Smyth, JWS Managing Director said: “We engaged Communicate following a tender process. They knew we were a newly formed team working on behalf of local authorities so had a restricted budget and they took this into consideration when responding to the tender.
“Communicate understood our requirements and were able to recommend a solution for our immediate IT demands, as well as considering the capacity we would need in the future and work that into the plans too. They also suggested ways to ensure resilience in case of any hardware failure with the installation.
“The office refit was underway when the Communicate team arrived on site. They were flexible in fitting our infrastructure and had the system installed in one morning. The team were courteous and did a spotless job in our newly refitted office. We are very happy to have used Communicate.”
