New app designed to make Glasgow’s bulk uplift service more efficient

Bulk uplift app: Picture credit - Glasgow City Council

Glasgow City Council has launched a new smart phone app designed to make the city’s free bulk uplift service faster and more efficient.

More than 100,000 bulk uplifts are requested in Glasgow a year and cleansing staff are using the new technology to receive real-time information when requests are made by the public.

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A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said: “We’re adopting new technology to work smarter, improve efficiency and enhance services for the public.

“The new bulk uplift app is being used internally by our staff to streamline the service and make it run more smoothly.

“It has made the service faster and more flexible. It is far more environmentally friendly than the old paper system and minimises time consuming admin.

“We’ve received good feedback from customers who have noticed that items are being removed faster.”

The app automatically groups requests into neighbourhood areas which are sent to team smartphones.

Staff use the app to record when they arrive at an address and when they leave, closing off completed jobs.

They can also record any problems with access and use the camera phone to take images of other issues discovered on arrival at an address – for example, if the request was to uplift an old bath but on arrival it is full of bricks and is too heavy to lift.

The app streamlines the old paper-based system where residents’ requests had to be printed out, manually sorted into neighbourhoods and physically handed to cleansing staff on a daily basis.

Trials of the app began in the city in August 2016 and more than 50 frontline cleansing operatives working from Dawsholm, Easter Queenslie, Polmadie and Shieldhall cleansing depots have now been trained to use it.