SUEZ Deutschland GmbH ranks number four among private waste management companies in Germany. Their subsidiary SUEZ Service GmbH organizes the transport of about 1,250,000 tons of recyclables per year with more than 650 external transport service providers. Significant administrative effort in assigning the transports required efficient ERP-integrated software support.

Recycling is a key issue with regard to the future—the recovery of raw materials from waste is becoming increasingly important, especially for a country like Germany that is poor in raw materials. As a subsidiary of SUEZ Deutschland GmbH, SUEZ Service GmbH organizes the transport of around 1,250,000 tons of recyclable materials per year from collection points to recovery points in industry, using more than 650 external forwarding service providers.

Across Germany, waste is sorted and recyclable materials are separated by type in state-of-the-art sorting facilities. These materials require recycling so that they can be used to produce new raw materials. At SUEZ, material flow managers take care of the commercialization of recyclable materials such as plastics, glass, metal, paper to industrial recyclers, but also of transporting residual waste to thermal recycling plants, where energy is generated from these residues.

To bring the materials to the appropriate plants, around 5,000 freight loads are generated each month. But how can you organize these pickups and transports? Until 2012, SITA/SUEZ worked with an online platform for transport auctions. But what was missing here was a more extensive ERP integration for more efficient processing. A lot of cumbersome manual work was still required ...