Biffa is one of the UK’s leading integrated waste management companies and collects over 250,000 bins a week, containing 2.1 million tonnes of waste a year, operating throughout the UK. With more than 195 sites across the UK, Biffa has been working with Smart Solutions for almost a decade across many of their facilities and depots to ensure smooth operations.

Modern Day Slavery

As a major workforce provider to industry sectors across the UK, Smart Solutions is aware it is a prime target for trafficking gangs seeking to exploit labour opportunities, is mindful of the devastating impact this crime can have and is taking a proactive approach to protect its workforce from abuse.

Working in partnership with Biffa, we have ensured that Modern Slavery is a key business priority and have been commended for our work on Modern Slavery prevention and detection.

At Smart Solutions, we focus on Modern Slavery from top down and bottom up to ensure we have buy-in at all levels. We have whistle blowing and escalation procedure for potential victims as well as training for operational staff on how to spot and report hidden labour exploitation. Transparency and collaborative working have been key throughout our partnership with Biffa. We share with each other what we can from a legal standpoint to ensure we are delivering a consistent message to our workforces. Our collaborative nature ensures we can take necessary action in an efficient manner if required.

MRF Production and Quality

Back in 2018 when the agenda was ever changing and the landscape around export paper quality from MRF’s a hot topic, Smart Solutions wanted to ensure we played our part and therefore introduced SmartScor.

SmartScor is our in-house developed program that aids the monitoring of workers’ performance to ensure MRF’s meet their quality targets by ensuring clear targets and rewards are also in place.

We implemented SmartScor at Biffa, who were on board straight away as they could see the merits from the programme, which gives Biffa essential data to track our performance and ensure value for money for our service.

As a result, Biffa has been tracking workers’ performance which has led to increased picking levels across a cross section of Biffa’s facilities. In addition, there has been an improvement in worker retention, which is a direct result from the voucher reward scheme

In January 2021 Smart and Biffa extended the partnership with BiffaVend – Smart now manages all flexible employee supply across England, Scotland and Wales via a panel of supplier agencies, assisted by our national customer support centre. This benefits the suppliers, Biffa hiring managers and gives Biffa a proactive partner to provide managed compliance levels, authorised hours sign off, consolidated invoicing and self bill portal for panel suppliers.

Kirsten Denton, Group Procurement Category Manager at Biffa commented “ for the first time via BiffaVend we now have in Smart Solutions one partner to manage all flexible employee supply, ensuring that compliance and the commercial aspects of the contract are consistently managed. The implementation of the contract and conversion of panel agency suppliers to Smart was done quickly and without any disruption to our business”