Cascades Recovery+ gains full visibility into their operations and improves efficiencies with the AMCS Platform

Cascades Recovery+ in Brief

Cascades, a Canadian company founded in 1964, recovers and re-uses resources, especially fiber from paper products, which then become the raw materials for some 500 packaging and tissue products that are composed mainly of recycled fiber.

Through growth, expansion, and acquisitions, the company today includes 12,000 employees in North America and Europe, with 100 production locations.

Its Cascades Recovery+ division centers on the company’s recycling efforts, offering its recycling business partners a 360-degree service, Recovery … PLUS^®. The program helps partners adopt a circular approach to recycling solutions through its Discarded Materials Management.

By consulting with and assessing partner operations, Recovery+ helps them use best practices to attain the highest rate of diversion of materials from landfills and minimizing costs. On average, their partners, from industrial/commercial and institutional, retail/grocer, graphics, and municipal sectors:

• Experience a 70 to 90% overall diversion of materials from landfill.
• Generate more than 40% reduction in their waste sectors throughout Canada and into the United States.

Recover+ helps maintain these impressive results via regular reporting, auditing, and reviewing of partner operations.

The challenge

The division had collected a mix of solutions over time, so much so that before AMCS, they wrestled with more than 40 databases, none of which spoke to the others. Consolidating the data was a huge and labor-intensive effort. In addition, the organization lacked a materials management solution to track the collection and processing of materials for downstream processes. In cases where data did exist, it was paper-based and collected only at the local level.

Except as keyed into the various databases or written on paper, no customer information was automatically recorded. Operations management was done on paper or in spreadsheets. That meant customer accounts, orders, dispatch, and routing were separate tasks, usually done on paper. They had no solutions to manage contracts, index pricing, or transactions for each of its 18 locations.

In short, no global view of the business was possible, and no end-to-end visibility existed. It was the classic siloed situation. The employees consolidated the data manually in a dauntingly cumbersome and time-consuming manner.

The solution brings substantial new efficiencies, ease of use, and end-to-end visibility

Cascades Recovery+ heard about AMCS through a recycling partner who had already converted their operations to the AMCS solution.

According to Business Process Expert of Finance Paul Kilgour, “AMCS gave us a global solution with standard tools that could integrate within Cascades solutions. Two factors were key in our selection of AMCS. First, they are innovators. Second, their professionalism. They have brought us a product that will meet our needs for today and are key for moving into the future.”

To date, the AMCS solution has been deployed at the first of 18 Recovery+ sites. What stands out right away is the streamlining of processes through automation and the end-to-end visibility of data, with fast access to data to meet their customers’ needs. “The Datamart allows us to respond to customers quickly using self-service business intelligent tools,” says Paul. Another popular innovation: the ability to enter a potential customer in a quotation module, allowing for the review of the potential of the customer or a group of customers.

Major features include scale house modules to manage and track activity at each MRF, providing a foundation for profitability via a closed-loop process to manage the inbound and outbound materials for brokerage and downstream operations. These work in conjunction with managing contracts, index pricing, and transactions in real-time.

To enhance customer experience, the robust customer service and operations management platform includes an AMCS Customer Call Center for placing and changing work orders in real-time and the AMCS Customer Web Portal for full account information and the ability to make payments using credit cards.

The AMCS Mobile Workforce component allows for route planning and management, with truck location and collection data transmitted to the office in real-time. In addition, newly requested orders can be integrated into in-progress routes for dynamic route management. Preventing missed stops and controlling truck location can be major sources of cost savings by reducing unnecessary trips, driver overtime, mileage, fuel consumption, emissions, and the like.

Cloud-based AMCS brings advanced benefits

The robust AMCS SaaS/cloud-based solution provides these benefits:

• Efficiency and cost reduction compared to on-premises deployments that require hardware, facilities, utilities, a large data center, and a large IT team.
• Security and access control
• Agility and scalability that automatically adapts to the needs of the business, eliminating the need to invest in physical infrastructure
• Mobility, for greater access to data via in-cab tablets and smartphones, as well as devices for those working from home
• Complete visibility and control of access
• No business losses caused by local downtime, as well as effortless disaster recovery