AMP Innovation, Technology & Agility

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

I’m excited for the redesign of our facility software UI, which will shift the user focus from engineers to our production operators. I enjoy contributing to work that centers on improving the end user’s experience. Our original UI has sufficed for a smaller user pool, but as we scale and grow, we need these UI improvements to allow for production operators to be more efficient in their roles. The new UI will put the information that’s most important to operators in focus. This allows for faster responses to plant happenings and easier decision-making to meet our throughput goals. Knowing that my work in validation and testing of this UI will contribute to AMP’s strategy of delivering durable diversion technologies is quite rewarding.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges will you need to overcome in the process?

The project is currently split into two phases over the first half of the year. The goal is to verify UI in the field for a significant period prior to bringing online our new facility in Denver with Waste Connections. I’ll collaborate with developers on the facility software team and individuals in the operations organization. Cross-functional communications can prove challenging given different preferences in methods of communication and expectations. Additionally, the amount of change will make testing more complex than it is for individual features and fixes. 

For communication challenges, I envision we’ll increase communications as redesign phases come ready for test. We’ll want to ensure that the right audience receives feedback from our end users and reports of any anomalies in testing to allow for swift resolution of any issues and keep the project on track. For testing challenges, working more closely with development to understand changes and their far-reaching effects will be key. This can include asking for demos and collaborating to write test cases to effectively exercise the changes made.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

My original foray into software testing almost 13 years ago was heavily UI-based for the software tools used in field programmable gate arrays/system-on-a-chip design. To effectively test, I needed to pull from past experience in technical support to understand users’ stories and identify how to help steer the software for the best user experience. This “step-into-their-shoes” method will be most beneficial as I keep the end user top of mind during test and validation of the new UI. My testing will yield much insight into what information is critical to operators and how they tend to use our software. This will help me create more effective test cases as we build out new features and tools in our software and provide better, more constructive feedback to my development team on features that affect plant operations.

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation, and how have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?

Automated sortation of trash is a really hard problem with real-world dynamics and issues. The engineering team at AMP has a trash sorting laboratory in Colorado, where we can use actual waste material for testing and innovation. With this ability, we encourage our teams to “get their hands dirty” and explore new innovations by testing and prototyping in the lab, and if they have merit, bring them into the real world and implement them into one of our production sorting facilities. 

Moreover, seeing problems firsthand and getting into the field has yielded many new innovations. We have all of our engineers visit one of our production sorting facilities in Ohio or Virginia. After a visit, the team returns with many ideas about how to improve our systems and gets to work putting those learnings into code or computer-aided design and then quickly implemented into our lab for testing.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

Both the software and hardware teams are constantly improving our sorting efficiency by brainstorming hypotheses, testing them and then rolling those innovations into production. We’ve seen quarterly increases in sort efficiency at our production recycling facilities between 3 and 5 percent. We have also spun out new products, like the AMP MicroJet, Delta-C and the AMP VAC, by being present in these environments and coming up with solutions to real-world problems.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture?

Working alongside and interacting with the production operators who spend all day in the plants has heightened AMP’s culture. Solving hard problems together strengthens the bond between engineering and operations and creates some great experiences that are impossible to duplicate outside of running materials recovery facilities.