Whitespace Work Software was born in 2005 when its founder, Phil Garvey, took over a small company providing bespoke software solutions to a number of clients in the public sector. Phil was working as a consultant at the time, and specialised in helping small businesses to grow sustainably. The business was taken over by his son Mark Garvey in 2015 and continues to be a family-run organization to this day.

As Mark Garvey, Whitespace’s CEO, explains it, Phil identified waste management and environmental services as an underdeveloped market, hired skilled developers, and set out to build a suite of products in that space.

"We’ve created an enterprise-class mobile system that can adapt to do whatever the client would want to do"

Mike Nicholls, Whitespace’s Commercial Director joined Whitespace in 2010, after working for enterprise scale companies including Oracle and Northgate (now NEC). “I moved to a company of 11 people and loved it. We’re a family-run business and have a family-style culture. As the company has grown, we have had to change our processes and procedures. There is more structure, but we still maintain that startup ethos.”

At the time, Whitespace had 10 customers for its products. Today that number exceeds 120, including 107 councils – which represents a 32% market share. The company no longer provides bespoke software, as Mike Nicholls explains “Everything we do is off the shelf, nothing is bespoke. We have one product set developed over a number of years to provide everything a customer could want to run a best-in-class waste and environmental service.”

There are 10 products in the Whitespace suite, including back-office and in-cab management software, detailed analytics, and software for tracking vehicle and driver behaviours in real-time. The software is built with an open approach and provides comprehensive APIs for customers and third-parties. Mike says that Whitespace’s mobile software is uniquely tailorable: “We’ve created an enterprise-class mobile system that can adapt to do whatever the client would want to do. This flexibility allows the customers to consistently gain more value as they use Whitespace.”

Waste collection is one of the most expensive activities that local authorities provide – as well as one with great potential to generate customer discontent. As such, Whitespace must deliver impressive results in the field. Mike proudly points out the company’s customer retention figure: 98%, as well as a plethora of other statistics from customers: 20% fuel savings in Manchester, a 63% improvement in recycling in Oxford and £44,000 in cost savings by one contractor.

Eastbourne Borough Council, a customer that is renewing its Whitespace contract (via the Data and Applications Framework) for a further four years with Bramble Hub, provides a strong success story. Eastbourne purchased four of Whitespace’s products:

Whitespace Municipal: manages household waste collection service operations
Whitespace Environmental: manages grounds maintenance and other environmental activities
Whitespace Mobile: links field teams to customer service centres in real-time
Whitespace Analytics: provides business intelligence tools and management reporting capabilities

Eastbourne, East Sussex

Additionally, integration into the council’s CRM system and website allows the public to provide and access information online. The council has reported a 50% reduction in paper usage since implementing Whitespace, and a more than 60% decline in customer complaints, as well as a significant reduction in the number of bins missed during collections. The success of deploying Whitespace within Eastbourne has led to the solution being extended to Lewes, a neighbouring council. The solution has enabled Lewes to reduce their collection rounds and save 90,000 miles of fuel: resulting in both a significant cost saving and a substantial reduction in the council’s CO2 emissions.

Whitespace offers a fully hosted service that complies with the ISO 27001 security standard, and is Cyber Essentials accredited. The service comes with full support from 7:30 - 17:30, as well as an out-of-hours critical support line.