Innovators: When one man’s trash is a council’s treasure
In the sunny state of Queensland, one council has turned its local garbage men and women into tech stars, thanks to a little help from TechOne and AI.
The Australian company that built software allowing people to register their dogs with local councils has spun off in another direction and now puts AI-powered smart cameras on rubbish trucks.
The twist of fate seems far flung from the kind of people and customer management software that helped TechnologyOne gain a name for itself, but its chief executive says the new direction is all part of a bigger picture in which governments and councils get an AI-fuelled makeover.
In a southeast Queensland region, where tech is quietly but quickly sprouting up from the ground, council rangers owe a lot to their local garbage men and women.
In Moreton Bay, a region encompassing Brisbane’s north, the Glass House Mountains and Bribie Island, rangers no longer ride around on bicycles in the heat, scouring the bitumen for potholes and cracks. Now, the local garbos do it for them.
Local rubbish trucks are fitted with cameras that scan the roads and footpaths searching for anything out of the ordinary. What they see is sent to the cloud and analysed using artificial intelligence, which can rate and rank the damage and open a request for it to be fixed.
TechnologyOne, the Australian tech giant powering the council’s now smart rubbish trucks, calls this intelligent defect management. It’s technology that has helped Moreton Bay Council detect twice as many road defects, and have them repaired at a rate 15 per cent faster.
Ed Chung, TechOne’s chief executive, says while most of the world is still searching for problems AI can genuinely fill, his company has found it – and the answer is holes in the bitumen.
“With AI right now, it’s such a buzzword and everyone’s talking about generative AI,” he says. “It’s not until people read about stories like this at Moreton Bay they’ll say, ‘OK, this is how it can be used and applied in real life’.”
When TechOne first set out to make the council’s rubbish trucks smart, potholes weren’t on the radar. “You know how footpaths always move? That’s where it started. And then it turned to potholes and then it turned to overgrown areas,” Chung says.
But it grew when TechOne realised there was a “bucket load” of data that could be utilised from garbage trucks. The cameras on the trucks aren’t any different to the ones the average person can buy off the shelf, Chung says.
Councils previously checked footpaths and roads once a year. So the real perk of utilising a garbage truck is that it’s done weekly.
The technology not only removes the physical need for a ranger to find the potholes but also the need to log and close requests, as once the trucks travel across the same area and detect the pothole has been filled, the requests are automatically closed.
While it seems unlikely, the smart garbage truck technology is indeed very on-brand for TechOne which, while hugely successful, doesn’t exactly build the kind of technology that comes up in the average person’s conversation at the pub. But that same demographic very much has, or will be, its users at one point or another.
“If you went to a uni or TAFE in Australia, you probably touched our software and you didn’t realise. You’ve probably enrolled through our software, changed your courses, paid your fees and even gotten a couple of sanction letters through it,” Chung says.
“When you finally graduate, you’ll get your testimony from our software too. Most people don’t realise that but these products are so mission critical, and they’re so complicated.”
TechnologyOne is Queensland’s largest listed tech company, and entered the ASX 100 earlier this year. It has more than 1300 customers with a core focus on the higher education, government and local council sectors, providing them with resource-planning software to run their operations on any platform.
The company has spent the last couple of years moving its customers from on-premise software into the cloud, and has posted consistent profit growth of 10 to 15 per cent year-on-year.
Earlier this year, TechOne outbid US tech giant Oracle to land the London Business School as a client. The win was celebrated widely internally, not only for outdoing a major competitor, but for the company’s plan to ramp up its hold over their overseas university markets.
Back home, Oracle has been increasingly competing with the company to land council customers in Australia, but Chung doesn’t see the company as a threat.
“Every couple of years, Oracle comes in with a KPMG type, and says we’re going to take TechOne’s space in local government – but they don’t have the product, the experience or the fortitude or the wherewithal to do it,” Chung says.
“We’re patient and we’re committed to the market and we keep going, and the same can be said for us in higher education.”
Oracle aside, the world of university management, where TechOne wants to become a global dominant player, is, in his words, a huge opportunity with relatively few competitors.
TechOne finds itself up against UK company Tribal, US company Ellucian and software called PeopleSoft, which is owned by Oracle.
The company’s next big venture is a product called DXP. “We’ve only got three customers live right now but every time we show a CEO or people see it, even if it’s not us doing the showing, the people are buying it,” Chung says. “It is just selling itself and it’s not even an app.”
The product is a database of every question ever asked of council and it can, after a user has asked a query, automatically log a request.
“So it uses the geolocation on your phone to determine where you are and, after you ask a question, it not only knows which council you are in, it’ll send you to the knowledge base’s result and it will process the request,” Chung says. “It’s what we call a Google-to-outcome experience.”
The List: Top 100 Innovators 2023 launches online and in The Australian on Friday, September 15. It is a celebration of Australia’s boundary pushers and fierce innovators.
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