Central service for waste disposal
As an institution under public law, Wirtschaftsbetriebe Duisburg is one of the city’s most important municipal enterprises. Its core tasks include waste disposal and city cleaning, the planning and maintenance of playgrounds, cemeteries, and parks, as well as flood protection and watercourse maintenance.
In close cooperation with its partners bpc and Gruler & Cleve Consulting, hmmh assumed overall responsibility for designing, implementing, and launching a customer portal based on the SAP Commerce Cloud — all within just six months. The portal now brings together online services for private households and property management companies related to waste disposal, with an ever-growing range of digital services.
Everything made easier – through the digitalization of complex processes
Managing buildings, properties, and the associated municipal services involves a significant manual effort for both WBD employees and private individuals or property management companies. The previous processes required extensive paperwork, frequent in-person appointments, and a considerable amount of time. Streamlining and simplifying these processes was to be achieved, among other things, through the digitalization and as much automation as possible of WBD’s extensive service portfolio.
This required highly complex ownership and management rights from the backend to be consolidated into a clear, user-friendly interface — with special attention to data protection. Various usage types for private households and businesses, different access rights for managers and owners, current and historical fee notices, upcoming changes to waste container configurations, an interactive waste calculator, and mobile access to all services were just some of the requirements the portal needed to meet.
A particular challenge was the timeline. The new portal had to go live within just over six months of the project’s launch, as the annual fee notices sent at the turn of the year would lead to the period of highest usage by end customers.
User-friendly frontend meets high-performance backend
In addition to designing and implementing the portal on the SAP Commerce Cloud, hmmh, acting as the general contractor, also managed the overall project, coordinating with other external partners who contributed their specialized expertise — for example, in the area of SAP Waste and Recycling components. On the WBD side, the usability of the interface and the benefits for portal users were given top priority to ensure the highest possible acceptance of the new service. During the design phase, various approaches were developed as clickable prototypes, allowing them to be reliably evaluated and optimized before actual implementation began. Meanwhile, the setup and basic configuration of the three-instance landscape for integration testing, acceptance, and live operation within the SAP Commerce Cloud were carried out.
Agile and effective for high implementation quality
In close coordination with the product owner and specialists from WBD’s departments, conceptual and development work were effectively run in parallel within an agile project setup. This allowed the results from workshops and designs to be directly implemented in the SAP Commerce Cloud and quickly verified through initial testing. The insights gained were immediately incorporated into the next implementation iteration and the ongoing design of additional features. This approach enabled the project team to maintain a strong focus on high implementation quality despite the tight timeline.
All features launched on time
Despite the tight timeline, the planned range of features — from digital notices and the account dashboard to the virtual assistant for calculating waste containers — was fully implemented without compromise. The go-live also ran smoothly, and the portal was successfully launched online without any issues, despite the application’s complexity.
High portal acceptance and continuous improvement
The number of registrations, the volume of triggered interactions, and the overall user acceptance of the customer portal exceeded WBD’s expectations within a very short time, making the project a complete success on the path toward digitalizing municipal services in Duisburg.
Since its launch, the added value of the portal compared to the old paper-based processes has continued to grow through new features. Today, more than 10% of Duisburg’s properties are already managed via meine-wbd.de — and the trend is rising. Soon, the online rental of containers, for example for garden waste or construction debris, will further expand Wirtschaftsbetriebe Duisburg’s digital portfolio.
Technology stack
Expectations clearly exceeded
Thanks to the outstanding expertise and solution-oriented approach of the service providers involved, we now offer our customers a pioneering online service whose usage figures have far exceeded all previous expectations.
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Sven Lohmeier
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