02 Dec A Knack for Operational Efficiency and a Way with Maps

Republic Services makes five million pickups nationwide every day, coordinating 18,000 trucks in the process. It’s not a logistics firm or a freight shipping powerhouse, but one of America’s largest trash haulers. Managing that operation—fuel, labor, routes—requires a commitment to operational efficiency that verges on the obsessive.

Marvis Kisakye, a Republic Services analyst who uses location software to speed up processes and save time across the enterprise, is a standout in this drive to optimize operations. She’s a member of a specialized team that employs geographic information system (GIS) technology to tackle some of the company’s toughest operations management challenges.

“I’ve always been a problem-solver,” Kisakye says. “I look at situations and [think], ‘I don’t like how this is. This should be improved.’”

Supporting a workforce of over 40,000, Kisakye has used GIS technology to help drivers plan their routes and calculate how far EV trucks can travel before recharging. On one project, she helped add over a million missing streets to the company’s routing maps, including alleys and rural roads. In another instance, the tools she developed helped the company link dumpster containers with customer accounts, improving the accuracy of billing and recouping millions in revenue.

“Her appetite for learning is really, really, really high,” says Jim Smith, a 20-year GIS veteran and a colleague of Kisakye’s at Republic Services. “[She] wants to do not only what they ask her to do as far as functionality, but to exceed it.”

Tackling Operational Efficiency with GIS

Across industries, GIS is becoming an engine for operational efficiency, powering faster routes and increasing productivity. The technology can be found across the enterprise, with GIS analysts working in operations, on supply chain teams, and in strategic planning divisions.

At Republic Services, multiple departments use GIS: It helps thousands of trucks reach millions of customers, powers online portals where clients can check service availability in their area, and allows managers to track how long vehicles remain in warehouses for tune-ups.

The GIS R&D team—composed of Kisakye, Smith, and their supervisor, Daniel Dreiling—applies innovation and experimentation to help the company achieve more using fewer resources. That made it a perfect fit for Kisakye, who thrives on autonomy and combines spatial thinking with the mindset of a developer.

“There’s a lot of unique problems that happen out in the field,” says Dreiling, who handpicked Kisakye for her role. “You’d think picking up trash is easy but there’s a lot of different idiosyncrasies that happen.” And they often take on a massive scale.

The company’s effort to add missing alleys, backstreets, and new roads to route maps felt like one such challenge. “We’re talking about filling in roads for the entire country,” Kisakye says. “A lot of people were like . . . ‘You can’t undertake such a task. It’s impossible; it’s ridiculous; it’s a nightmare.’”

Yet, without precise maps of the country’s roadways, the company couldn’t verify whether drivers were taking their assigned routes—an important measure of efficiency.

For Kisakye, this all sounded like a juicy opportunity. Today, thanks to the creative use of location data and a custom GIS toolkit developed by Kisakye, Republic Services’ maps have the accuracy drivers and managers need.

Following a GIS Career Path to Opportunity

Kisakye sees operational challenges as puzzles to solve. Earlier in her life, she faced constraints that were far less rewarding.

Kisakye grew up in Kampala, the lively capital city of Uganda in East Africa, where motorbikes rev through streets crowded by vendors and dance clubs pulse late into the night.

While she absorbed the city’s hustle and entrepreneurial energy, the future she imagined felt narrow. Her parents—and those of her friends—saw three acceptable careers for their children: doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

She studied civil engineering in college and discovered GIS technology through land surveying courses. The applications excited her, but there were only three computers for every 100 students.

“I remember always being frustrated and thinking, ‘I could do this and this and this, and I could be here and here,’” she says. “It was a frustrating place to be in—to feel helpless, where you know you have the brain to do stuff, but you’re limited by resources.”

When her boyfriend (now husband) was offered a job at Intel in Arizona, Kisakye saw an opportunity to widen her horizons. Enrolling in a master’s-level GIS program at Arizona State University, she discovered that every student was assigned their own computer. “I can research all the stuff I’ve always wanted to research,” she thought excitedly.

Turning Maps and Apps into Tools for Action

After finishing her master’s program and completing a stint at the Arizona Department of Health Services, Kisakye eventually found herself in Republic Services’ R&D department—a place that rewarded her self-starter approach and passion for making an impact. Self-taught in several programming languages, she builds GIS-based tools and applications that make rote processes more efficient. Over time, these operational improvements add up to big savings in time and money.

Her bias for action was ignited when she heard about the service maps that finance administrators use to track business divisions across the country. The division boundaries frequently shift as service areas grow or shrink, and updating these maps every month or quarter consumed weeks of time. Kisakye created a GIS tool that automates the sequence, populating maps with new assets that formerly had to be added manually. A process that once took up to a month now requires 20 to 30 minutes.

Her work on finding dumpster containers that were unaccounted for also involved an intuitive solution to a long-standing challenge. Smith figured out that by tracing the movements of trucks, they could determine which containers were used by which customers. Marvis incorporated that model into a GIS application that’s now used across the company, improving process performance by 86 percent, making billing more precise, and increasing cash flow.

Making the lives of drivers easier has always been a concern of Kisakye’s. She spotted an opportunity to do exactly that when she saw the maps drivers used in pre-trip planning: often hand-drawn or printed out and annotated with pens.

She built a GIS program that automates the creation of route maps. The software zeroes in on clusters of customers and produces maps that show logistics analysts and drivers where they need to go and how best to plan their routes, aiding operational efficiency.

Faced with Challenges, an Attitude That Sees Only Opportunities

For as long as she can remember, Kisakye has loved solving problems and finding ways to streamline tasks. Now, equipped with digital tools and information, the possibilities seem limitless.

“You can do anything,” she says, giving voice to the attitude that has shaped her into a force for change at Republic Services. “You have everything you need to do whatever you want. So, what’s stopping you?”