SUEZ Deploys New eCommerce Portal to Manage Waste

Mendix, a Siemens business and global provider in no-code/low-code application development for the enterprise, announced that SUEZ, a global waste management and water treatment company, has deployed the SUEZ eCommerce Portal—the first customer pricing tool in the United Kingdom to enable instant, fully transparent, self-service quotes for waste management.

Developed in less than three months using the Mendix low-code platform, the SUEZ eCommerce Portal replaced the company's door-to-door sales effort. This customer-facing application has driven new business revenue in excess of £500,000 and reduced the cost of customer acquisition by 20 percent, according to the company.

Guided by a customer's postcode, the SUEZ eCommerce Portal interfaces with SUEZ's core data and pricing models to provide customers with accurate, executable quotes, added the company.

SUEZ utilized the Mendix platform's visual development capabilities to integrate its business and information technology (IT) teams on the collaborative effort. With this application, SUEZ joins with other global innovators, led by the U.N.'s United Smart Cities initiative, that are integrating data-driven technology with waste management services to optimize sales infrastructure and fleet operations to achieve zero waste and reduced carbon emissions.

"Our mission is to live in a society where there is no more waste," said Matt Rogers, chief information officer (CIO) for SUEZ's U.K. business, in a statement. "Now, we are not only using low-code technology to minimize the impact of waste on the environment, but we are also eliminating it from our own internal systems and processes. The complexity of looking after 10,000 postcode sectors across the country, each with different strategies for every single waste type, means there's literally millions of possibilities in our pricing engine. We couldn't find a product that addressed our unique requirement to customize our pricing data to map across different geographic locations, so we had to develop it."

SUEZ repurposes 8.5 million tons of materials and produces more than 1.1 million megawatt hours of renewable energy from waste in the U.K. every year. By being able to create easily reusable assets that can be shared across the organization, SUEZ intends to extend the use of the Mendix platform to develop more applications to help reduce the environmental impact of waste materials in the near future.

"Where there's a gap in our application portfolio, we're able to use low-code to bring new ideas to market a lot quicker," added Rogers. "We're now able to bring to life projects that would have never been born without using the right technology. With low-code-empowered rapid application development, any employee who has an idea to improve the business can make it happen."

"Proving the value of IT investments to the board can be an arduous task for any CIO," said Derek Roos, CEO at Mendix, in a statement. "Using low-code technology that enables any team to contribute to the software development process is one way to achieve results quickly. SUEZ, at the forefront of a seemingly traditional industry, has taken a giant leap in their digital journey that not only helps customers get the vital information they need to make an informed choice but enables SUEZ to expand its offering in the U.K. and service more customers at a much lower cost than previously possible."