Lindum chooses modern enterprise platform to position them for strategic growth in innovative waste management.

Limerick, November 18th, Lindum AS is one of the leading players in Norway in the treatment of organic waste and contaminated masses. The company operates two biogas plants that process food waste for about 1.2 million people. They convert food waste and sludge into either biogas or agricultural soil and compost for food production. Lindum also conducts extensive R&D activities, provides skip rental, and even offers solutions and advice for odour control. Despite being wholly owned by the municipality of Drammen, Lindum AS runs like a private company. Operating efficiently and ‘profitably’ is how Lindum helps the city fulfil its sustainability goals. In 2019, the company had 640 million NOK in sales and handled 1.4 million tonnes of waste.

As a company at the forefront of innovative and value-added waste management, moving from an assortment of legacy systems to the modern AMCS Cloud-based Platform offers Lindum the efficiency and scalability to expand and offer more sustainability solutions. As a company at the forefront of innovative and value-added waste management, moving from an assortment of legacy systems to the modern AMCS Cloud-based Platform offers Lindum the efficiency and scalability to expand and offer more sustainability solutions.

Lindum’s decision to implement the AMCS Cloud-based Platform is expected to boost their ability to grow the organisation organically and expand their services to offer even more solutions for sustainability. Established in 1997, the Lindum Group consists of Lindum AS and four subsidiaries that provide different types of solutions in numerous areas of waste management and resource utilisation. With 155 employees operating 11 locations across southern, eastern, and western Norway, the company is focused on their vision of being a leader in sustainable resource recovery – for the sake of the environment.

Optimising control over a wide range of value-added waste management

Frode Steen, IT Manager for Lindum, explains how the growing complexity of services to capture ever more renewable resources was making it difficult to continue working with a variety of individual legacy systems. “With our two biogas companies, we treat the organic waste for approximately 20 to 25% of the country. We manage landfills. We provide skips and roll on roll off trucks for materials from iron scrap to wood chips. We also do a lot of research and development, which includes a complete greenhouse ecosystem to help us study and perfect the process of going from food to waste to food again.” Other things Lindum has been working on are recipes for treating hazardous wastes, such as oil-contaminated masses, to make them safer and reduce their material grading to ‘normal’ polluted waste.

“Lindum has grown rapidly over the last 10 years, and as a result, we were working with seven or eight different systems. We wanted to consolidate them to be able to move data around the organisation more easily,” says Steen. The company is currently in the design and implementation phase of the project with the active rollout expected in early 2021. He admits that implementing a new enterprise system sometimes feels like trying to change the engine of an aeroplane in mid-air, but the ability to document, trace, and standardise all workflows across the business makes it all worth it.

Streamlining multiple systems into one standard of best practices

To operate more flexibly and efficiently, Lindum was focused on the idea of working with only a single vendor with a comprehensive enterprise system. They believe this will help them meet the challenges associated with more strategic growth in the years to come. The goal is to use the enterprise solution across the company to standardise their practices. For example, the three skip/RORO locations each have a different way of working. With the integrated enterprise software, Lindum can streamline the three different work processes into one best practice.

Lindum expects the streamlining of the entire process from sales to order, invoicing, and reporting with AMCS’s Cloud-based Platform will help them improve the entire customer experience from start to finish. One piece of functionality they know will have a big impact on the efficiency of their service is the Customer Portal that will replace the more time-consuming e-mails and calls for Lindum’s customer service and order process. The new efficiency will allow Lindum to shift workloads within their teams, so that people have more time to perform the tasks that add value for the company. In addition, automation and the more efficient tracking and exchange of information through the system means employees can more easily take over work from one another. Teams can work much more flexibly and effectively – and proactively for customers.

Professional solution to benefit customers in the circular economy

“Why AMCS? There were two reasons,” says Steen. “First, we were looking for a platform that could match our various lines of business. It was clear that AMCS understands the waste management business through and through.” He adds that during the implementation project, it was clear that the project managers were highly professional with an in-depth knowledge of the best practices in waste management solutions. “You can see that there is a clear logic in these solutions. That doesn’t mean it is easy, but the logic is visible.”

“The second reason we chose AMCS,” Steen continues, “is because of what we expect from them. We look forward to the continuous development in the solutions that will enable us to expand our business as the playing field for sustainability and renewable resources continue to grow and mature.” He and his team are very much looking forward to working closely with AMCS on those developments to further optimise the journey for their customers.

According to Pål Smits, Lindum’s CEO, the world is currently in the middle of a paradigm shift, where waste is no longer waste, but rather a valuable resource. “Traceability, transparency, mobility, and standardisation are all becoming increasingly important in sustainability and our ability to capture and recover as much of the renewal capacity of waste management as possible, for the sake of the environment,” he says. “As cycles become more closed in the transition toward a circular economy, having the right data throughout the workflows for all of our business will become more and more critical. As the sustainable solutions that we can offer our customers continue to grow, the standardisation and scalability of our enterprise system will enable us to do so efficiently and effectively for the ultimate benefit of the customer.”