Veolia describes itself as an organization that provides solutions for ecological change – a one-stop shop to help other businesses and organizations meet their ESG and sustainability commitments, with the aim of combating climate change. Veolia’s solutions are designed to help organizations reduce carbon, as well as preserve natural resources and product biodiversity.
It serves up to 7 million residents and municipal businesses, collects waste from 175,000 locations, equivalent to 2.3 million tons per year, and recycles more than 60 million coffee cups a year.
Central to Veolia’s ambitions to help customers improve their sustainability goals are Veolia’s own digital systems. Paul Watkeys, Head of Digital Products at Veolia UK & Ireland, explains how the company works in the cloud – using Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow and Google as its main platforms of choice. On the role of digital, Watkeys says:
I think it has been widely recognized for several years at Veolia that digital transformation is one of the main drivers for delivering improved sustainability services, whether it is through data driven optimization, or whether that is in through analytics, services and improved customer experience or business optimization.
Especially if you look around today at the need, for example, for reducing the carbon overheads of fleets and vehicles, and the ability for route optimization in real time – this not only improves the customer experience, but it also reduces the net carbon overhead.
We think this is a key driver. I don’t think it’s entirely dependent on digital innovation, but certainly digital innovation is a key driver and a contributor and an ingredient in that mix.
Veolia has a core policy throughout the organization: ‘secure, anytime, anywhere, any device’ – which means that employees, colleagues, partners and workers must have the ability to access key business information and customer in a secure manner at any location.
This proved particularly helpful during the pandemic, recalls Watkeys:
I think flexibility has allowed us, especially through the challenges of COVID-19, to respond to our customer’s needs in a sustainable way, but also to provide continuity of service that was not shown in same standard in many other areas.
So, for example, if you can imagine that some industries were stopped or reopened based on government initiatives at that time. That means, for us, reorganizing our route cycles, understanding our customer’s needs, making sure we have the right resources and disposal processes in place to deliver what’s happening in a 24 hour real time basis.
We probably wouldn’t have been able to do that without our core backbone, the digital new age technology, which is a strategy we started in 2017.
The role of Salesforce
Veolia has been using Salesforce for several years for CRM, sales and marketing. Watkeys explained that the platform allows the organization to benefit from best-in-class CRM on the market today, but also allows Veolia to innovate – be it through a no-code, or code-driven approach . He says:
This has allowed us to have a degree of flexibility that allows us to maintain diversity in the market. So even though Salesforce CRM is a popular application, and many customer companies and competitors have access to it, they don’t necessarily have access to the processes, triggers, flows, customizations that we’ve invested in. on the platform.
So it is a platform to leverage innovation. It is a platform for us to develop intellectual property. It is a platform for us to drive our business optimization, business growth, reduce customer churn and improve customer service.
An example of this is how Veolia started in 2017 to develop a customized end-to-end, cloud-based operating system dedicated to the collection and disposal of hazardous waste – the most complex type of waste in existence. Watkeys said:
Hazardous waste can range from greasy rags from a mechanic’s shop to petrochemical waste, it can go as far as pharmaceutical waste. So there are hundreds and thousands of different types of waste.
Salesforce allowed Veolia to develop a compliant cloud-based system that not only improved the hazardous waste collection experience, but also saved the company millions of pounds. Watkeys explains:
The transportation of those goods, the management and disposal of those goods, is the most highly regulated within the waste management industry. So we developed a system that goes through lead nurturing, to standard opportunity management, to appointment creation, vehicle routing, waste collection, customer notification, back to our disposal site and chemically. testing that takes place in labs.
Throughout that journey, Salesforce creates, in a paperless way, all the necessary compliance records required. All necessary regulatory requirements, shipping records, digital signatures.
The system has enabled us to generate at least £1.8 million, year to date, in internal optimization and overhead savings. And that is based on an investment of £350,000.
So we generated a £1.8 million expected EBITDA benefit through an investment of £350,000. Just this year. So it improves our customer service and it gives us a platform that operates and offers a real difference.
Learnings
Watkeys argues that Master Data Management has been key to Veolia’s digital strategy, in terms of integration with the company’s main cloud platforms, to get the right data to the right people at the right time. To do this, the company developed its own middleware, while minimizing the amount of data transformations that take place, in order to provide holistic reporting to its customers:
[Without this] it would be nearly impossible to adequately report on carbon metrics, for example, to support our customers in their sustainability goals.
Ultimately, from an ESG perspective, reporting and transparency are key. So we see the data as the life of the mechanism.
In terms of lessons learned, Watkeys says that for Veolia, getting senior and mid-level stakeholders involved as soon as possible has been key to helping manage change:
I am a great believer in the fusion team approach. I think projects and program delivery teams should be an equal mix of technical people and business people, and also our customers. I think in the past, we failed to understand that early on and sometimes we created a gap between the expectations of the business stakeholders and ultimately what was delivered from a technological sense.
I think, to be honest about change management and user adoption, the whole feedback loop – I think you can’t underestimate the wisdom of and the value of input that colleagues across the organization give to those terms of user experience and user interaction.
I think again in the past we tend to look at things from and ‘inside-out view’, starting with the technology first. Whereas I think the approach of thinking design from the ‘outside-in’ and always asking the question ‘why? why? why?’ is critical.
I think if you start small, deliver something, deliver fast, iterate, iterate, iterate, you start to build confidence, you build momentum. And you also give yourself the opportunity to fail quickly. Don’t be afraid to fail, but if you are going to fail, fail fast. It contains costs, concerns, emotions, and sustains effort and effort and belief.
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