There’s an outdated relic of the past still draining efficiency.
The enduring presence of paper is one of the largest causes of time and energy wasted for organisations who work in the infrastructure and environmental maintenance arenas. Surprisingly, it’s still prevalent in day-to-day operations, in everything from inspections to reporting.
The challenge
Double-handling of information comes at a cost to businesses; paper means a lack of real-time updates, misplaced records, hours spent in manual data entry, lags in communication and decision making, slowing operations and hindering progress.
This is exactly the experience Quest Waste Management Ltd were faced with, with Dale Hogan (Operations Supervisor) working through a paper trail of records for their gully maintenance operations every day.
Dale explains the process; “We have a lot of gully contracts,” he says. “We need to know where those gullies are, record the inspection, and feed it back to the client.”
With flood prevention a necessary focus for companies working in the industry to keep our roads safe and working, MGISS is dedicated to developing solutions that contribute to this focus with expertise and adaptability. Surface water accumulation alone presents a massive risk to safety and causes damage, and the increase of flood risk and ageing assets is a challenge that looms on the country’s horizon.
Gullies are an essential element to drainage; from highways to urban streets and industrial sites, and ensuring that the teams who service them have the right tools is a priority.
Dale and the team at Quest Waste Management deal with gullies blocked from debris, and often face inaccessible or difficult-to-locate gullies, complicating routine maintenance. These challenges, on top of potentially incomplete or insufficiently logged paper reports, were why Quest Waste Management were in need of a solution.
“Our old system was built just on trust with our engineers,” Dale explains. “We would give them a spreadsheet every day with a set amount of gullies, and they would tick off that they’d done it, but we had no way to record evidence of it.”
With no verifiable data and no way to confirm completed work in real-time, this old system was creating major challenges for Dale and his team, not only in accountability but in overall efficiency. With engineers relying on a paper-based process; errors, delays and missed updates, coupled with the manual task of consolidating daily records was becoming a significant barrier in Quest West Management’s gully maintenance.
“It was massively time-consuming for myself,” Dale tells us, “because once the engineers finished, I had to upload what had been done onto a spreadsheet every day – anywhere from 300 to 500 gullies a day! It was taking at least a couple of hours each evening when I could have been getting on with other work.”’
"Life is a lot easier. You’re not searching through pieces of paper, the app is working exactly the way it should be, it does it all for you. It’s freed up a lot of time for myself in the office. Instead of spending two or three hours uploading gullies every evening, it’s done in minutes."
The solution
So Quest Waste Management approached MGISS and explained these challenges, and MGISS proposed the perfect fix: Gully Maintenance Software. With the requirements of replacing an inefficient, paper-based process with a live digital system with high-level reporting capabilities, this software was tweaked and tailored to Quest Waste Management’s needs.
“With the Gully Maintenance Software,” Dale says, “there are pictures of every gully, and so assets are being better assessed, if they need maintenance. If they’re broken, we can take a picture of that, send it that day and they can get an engineer out to fix it there and then. We’re finding that we’re getting a lot better feedback from the clients with this new system.”
Powered by high-accuracy GNSS technology, featuring real-time data capture and with MGISS custom automation running in the background, operatives for Quest Waste Management can upload and process thousands of gullies in under 30 seconds, with a super-smart consolidation process to hand Dale a ready-made report at the end of the day.
The result
Dale outlines the difference of having a working maintenance system: “A lot of our challenges were obviously in the spreadsheet – there could be ten gullies in a street, the engineers think they’ve accessed a certain gully, but the reference might not match up. Whereas with the system now, it pinpoints exactly what gully is which. And then it literally builds the spreadsheet for you, and does everything for you, which makes all of our lives easier.”
Engineers for Quest Waste Management can now identify and record the exact location of thousands of gullies, with the stress of data management automated and simplified in an intuitive system, eliminating the guesswork and manual correction of the past. The Professional Services team at MGISS love a challenge, and they thrive on crafting solutions for their clients. But they also pride themselves in excellent support after a solution is built, so that new systems are not only smoothly adopted but expertly optimised.
“The support and the background from MGISS were next to none,” Dale assures us. “As soon as you rang, he would answer and fix it then and there over the phone. Instead of passing an issue on, he would sort it straight away, and that experience was a lot better and quicker than we’ve ever experienced before.”
So, for Quest Waste Management, how has the Gully Maintenance Software transformed the way they work? “For the engineers on-site, it’s a lot easier and a lot quicker for them,” Dale answers. “They’re not scribbling on a piece of paper, they’re not searching for areas when they get to site and they think there should be ten gullies but they can only find four. The GPS actually pinpoints each gully and where the team need to be, so they know where to look for them.”
“From the office side,” he continues, “life is a lot easier. You’re not searching through pieces of paper, the app is working exactly the way it should be, it does it all for you. It’s freed up a lot of time for myself in the office. Instead of spending two or three hours uploading gullies every evening, it’s done in minutes, which allows me so much time to put into other projects and work in the business.”
“Plus, we can plan the work out ahead of time for the team,” he continues. “We don’t have to worry because it’s just there on the app for them to use. They can communicate so much better, and the whole process is much quicker.”
With Quest Waste Management already celebrating the adoption of the Gully Maintenance Software as a success story for their business, and with the transformative effect on the critical operational challenges of the past, we ask Dale whether he sees potential for wider adoption within the business.
“We’re looking into it now,” Dale responds. “When it comes to Highways, for example; CAD Drawing and GPS, this new system would work lot better there, where we can actually start getting everything on an app. So instead of drawings just on an email, they can have the drawings live in front of them.”
“The Gully Maintenance Software from MGISS has just made everything a lot easier,” Dale concludes. “And I can see that happening elsewhere for the business, too.”
The industry is always evolving to meet current and predicted challenges, and the modernisation of tech, process and asset systems is essential for infrastructure and maintenance organisations like Quest Waste Management. Beyond levelling-up and leaving paper behind, organisations can look at the bigger picture; flood prevention, road safety and a process that is robust enough to deal with future challenges. Overall, an investment in Gully Maintenance Software from MGISS is a guarantee for a stronger, healthier business future.
This article appeared in Issue 327 of Drain Trader magazine, July 2025. You can view it here.