Managing PCI compliance

by Keith Barker, Editor, Recycling Product News

The City of Toronto operates 16 scales at seven transfer stations as well as their Green Lane landfill located in London, Ontario. Their overall operation includes a materials recycling facility and an organics processing operation, with a second organics facility set to come on line this year. The second organics operation will provide capability to handle more than three times what the former system could handle, amounting to about 70 metric tonnes per day.  

According to Bert Neutel, Senior Systems Integrator at the City of Toronto, recycling and diversion is a major priority for them. When it comes to diversion, he says, they strive to reach a 70 percent diversion goal, with some material still going south to the U.S., depending on the short-term contracts used, and where the end markets are.   

“The winner of a contract for aluminum may be down in New Jersey, another time they may be out of Quebec or another part of Ontario,” explains Neutel. “We basically make our material available, different companies will bid on it, and depending on who it is, they generally haul their own material away.”

 The City of Toronto also owns a fleet of haulage and collection vehicles and contracts out some collection. At the city’s seven transfer stations, they deal with all city-collected waste, as well as from the public, private-charge customers and other municipalities. The elimination of loads being shipped to Michigan has decreased costs, with respect to both fuel and tipping fees, but it does mean close to twice as many trips through their scales per day. Altogether, the City of Toronto processes over 100 million tonnes of material every year. 

One aspect of a waste management operation the size of the City of Toronto, with all of the traffic coming in and out, past 16 scales, is that a great many payment transactions, along with a large amount of data and customer information needs to be managed accurately and securely. Since 2009, the City of Toronto has been working with Maryland-based weigh software provider, Paradigm Software, L.L.C., whose CompuWeigh System has since been installed at multiple facilities.

“They selected Paradigm in July, 2009 and we were tasked to have the software live by January, 2010,” says Jackie Barlow II, of Paradigm. “We worked diligently to get that done. The City of Toronto is a large operation, and it’s definitely not one of those you can turn around in a couple of weeks, or a month for that matter.”  

The challenges of PCI Compliance
PCI (payment card industry) compliance is a requirement that comes from the payment card industry, whereby the major credit card companies of the world set the standards as to how point of sale credit card transactions can be processed. (www.pcicomplianceguide.org.)

“The City of Toronto is now managing their credit card processing through our application,” says Barlow. “In 2009, when we won the installation, and at the beginning of 2010 when we originally went live, our software was not required to be PCI Compliant. In 2011, the payment card industry came out and said anyone who touches a credit card has to be PCI compliant. There has to be a certain type of encryption, and you can’t store credit card numbers, etc. So we went through a rigorous re-write of our credit card processing system, called WeighPay, which is now PCI compliant and validated.”

When the City of Toronto went live with Point of Sale (POS) integration in the fall of 2011, using Paradigm’s WeighPay module, they were the first Canadian waste industry operation to become completely PCI compliant, and one of the first companies in North America. 

The process of becoming PCI compliant is not an easy one. It involves changing codes, and then getting a compliance certificate from the agencies that certify. Then companies need to work with their payment provider, whether it is Moneris, VeriSign, Global Payment Systems, etc., and go through their certification process.

“Of course, being one of the first to go through a new process, there was a lot of learning done on both sides,” says Neutel.  Now, Neutel says their new PCI compliant system gives them more control than they had previously, and makes transaction processing much faster. Paradigm’s WeighPay module is the piece that makes PCI compliance possible.

“We are operating sixteen Weigh Station workstations, all configured with WeighPay, and CompuWeigh which is Paradigm’s administration module,” says Neutel. “So all users, whether they are doing weigh-scale processing or whether they are accessing data for reporting or query reasons, or doing any work on CompuWeigh, they are going through WeighPay for their security.”

Eliminating errors, saving time
According to Neutel, every company that is electing to go to an integrated point of sale system has to go through the same complicated process. Many organizations in the waste and recycling industry still use a standalone manual system, where you punch in the transaction, it spits out a total, and then they process the debit card or credit card completely separate from the rest of the system.

“There’s a number of problems with this method,” says Neutel. “No matter how careful people are, there’s always some errors made in transcribing figures from the computer system to the point of sale system. It’s a low percentage, but when you are dealing with cash, it can be a major headache.”

“Anybody who is using a non-integrated terminal, they have PCI compliance, but they are not integrating it to their software, so they are not communicating the same information that systems like Paradigm’s, or other integrated point of sale applications, are transmitting.”

“With a manual system, there’s definitely going to be errors,” continues Neutel. “And also, issues at the end of the day, reconciling. You have two separate systems and you have to reconcile them. You get your settlement from your POS (point of sale) system, and you have a settlement from your transaction processing system on the computer. Not every day, but there will be days when you have discrepancies and you have to account for those discrepancies.”

After the Paradigm system was installed, Toronto went from an hour-long process (approximately) at the end of each day, at each site, to reconcile, to less than five minutes for each. Still, when there is a discrepancy identified, a cash discrepancy needs to be created, which can also be done quickly through the Paradigm system.

“And the audit is 100 percent,” adds Neutel. “We always had to maintain an auditable system, but there was a great deal more paperwork, and writing involved. And how do you prove there are no discrepancies using a manual system? You have to tabulate, cross-tabulate and you are constantly redoing the math, and re-totalling up columns, and it’s just never 100 percent.”

“When it’s fully integrated, as with Paradigm’s system, you have 100 percent auditability and 100 percent control.” Barlow says at another recent CompuWeigh installation in California, their scale operators were inadvertently making over 400 errors per month. “Using our system, they’ve reduced that to less than 25 because of business rules that are now in place within the system.”  

The CompuWeigh System
“The CompuWeigh System can have different modules built into it,” explains Barlow. “For example, it may have an unattended module or it may include radio frequency devices, where we can read a radio frequency device on a truck. Or sometimes there is a scale monitoring module, or rule modules.

“What the WeighPay PCI compliant and validated module allows us to do is process transactions directly within our system,” he says. “Without such a system, companies have to use a separate terminal for their POS and their credit card processing.”

“Our system informs the scale operator that the transaction totals $100 (for example) the operator swipes the card on a PCI compliant reader that is connected to the computer. Information is sent to a processor such as Global Payment Systems, and the payment is authorized. We store that authorization directly within our system, reports are reconciled immediately, and the scale operator is doing nothing but hitting enter and swiping the card.”

At Toronto, Barlow says they have also installed scale monitoring, which monitors the weight on the scale.

“You never know what’s really going on with your scale, unless you are monitoring it with video 24/7,” he says. “Scale monitoring continuously monitors the weight on the scale. If a vehicle drives on, then drives off, but no transaction is recorded, that raises a red flag for management.”

Besides the elimination of operator error, time and money savings, Barlow says it is the functionality, available out of the box, that helps set their software apart, as well as 24/7, 365 days a year support. 

“We have been doing this for 22 years,” says Barlow. “We still have our very first customer that went live in April 1992, and they are still using our software at multiple locations.”