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Recycling waste to reduce its impact on the environment

“With Talend, we manage all of our logistics flow in real time, from collection to waste recovery, which allows us to measure service efficiency and evaluate optimization scenarios.

CA S E S T U DY

”Eric Blanchot, CIO, Veolia Recyclage & Valorisation des déchets.

Every day, human activity produces about ten billion kilos of waste. Consequently, we understand the need for greater conservation of resources, a major issue for the planet and its inhabitants in the years to come.

With 71,000 employees across five continents, 17,000 of whom are in France, Veolia is the world’s second largest operator in the waste and sanitation sector. In France, Veolia Recyclage & Valorisation des Déchets (RVD) [Veolia Recycling & Waste Recovery] is involved in all stages of the waste chain, its collection, sorting, transfer and treatment before its final transformation into secondary material or energy.

Fifty-two million tons of waste are treated every day on behalf of 50 million of France’s citizens. Veolia Recyclage & Valorisation des Déchets runs 637 treatment units. Household waste, non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste, construction waste, green waste, hazardous industrial and tertiary waste: the diversity of the waste categories makes its collection a real logistical challenge. Waste of the same type is collected in assembly centers where the waste is compacted before being sent to a sorting or treatment site that has been adapted to attain a recovery rate of up to 95%. The recovered waste then becomes secondary raw material for industry. Non-hazardous, non-recyclable waste is sent to incineration plants to produce energy in the form of steam or electricity, or it is sent to storage centers that collect the biogas that is released by the fermentation of organic waste.

“Our operations are about managing flow,” explains Eric Blanchot, CIO, Veolia Recyclage

& Valorisation des déchets. “Each company within the Group is on a mission to set the standard for the recycling of materials and the production of green energy. Decision- making and steering operations are a strategic imperative on a daily basis.”

Creating a decision-supporting data warehouse, based on a common data repository“The complexity lay in the fact that our job is very specific, we rely on a minimal amount of integrated software: our information system is made up of different technical components that, for the most part, have been developed in house,” reveals Eric Blanchot. “In addition, each office and regional branch was using its own data warehouse and repository. In this scenario, it was impossible to have a consolidated picture of France as a whole and to compare the regions.”

To add an additional layer of complexity, the Veolia Group had started its migration to the Google and AWS public clouds and it was essential that “on premises” applications and the Cloud were able to communicate.

“First of all, we had to work on integrating all of the data produced by our various applications in order to feed a consolidated decision-supporting data warehouse at a national level. Secondly, we needed to automate application dialog practically in real-time. Finally, we had to set up a common data repository to ensure the consistency of our data. In Talend, we have found a partner capable of supporting us in all of these areas,” says Eric Blanchot happily.

INDUSTRY

• Energy/Environmental services

INFORMATION• Head office: France

• 10,001+ employees

USE CASE• Operational effectiveness

• Steering the company

CHALLENGE• Creating a decision-supporting data warehouse, based on a common data repository

TALEND PRODUCTS USED• Talend MDM

• Talend Data Integration/ESB

• Talend Data Quality

RESULTS • Time and cost of developing interfaces reduced threefold

• Optimization of the plant availability threshold (beyond 8,000 operational hours per year) and of the utilization rate of trucks (on average five turn-around runs per day or more for industrial waste operations).

• Customized reports sent regularly to the business’s various departments – the managing director, regional management, field management, etc.

Why Talend? Since 2010, Veolia’s waste recycling and recovery operations have relied on Talend

Data Integration to create a data warehouse whose purpose is to help management optimize decision-making. It now contains more than 1.5 TB of data, and is updated nightly. All moving, transformation and loading operations are now handled in the tool.

The second stage was to guarantee the consistency and quality of the data feeding the decision-supporting data warehouse. “Everybody is responsible for their data. Talend Data Quality helped to “clean” the data at source, in the application itself, before integrating it into the data warehouse. We have standardized the waste categories, reducing them from 10,000 to 1,200. This was a necessary step in order to create more relevant analyses.”

Finally, with Talend MDM, Veolia Recyclage et Valorisation des déchets has created a common repository of operational data. This covers Veolia RVD’s operational repository, which has been separated into different categories: materials (a nomenclature with four levels, classified by family: ferrous, copper, aluminum, etc.), types of equipment (10,000 vehicles, containers), sites (by region, territory, and treatment centers) and service types (logistics, composting, sorting, energy recovery, etc.).

Indicators to measure the performance of recycling sites“We can now benefit from a very comprehensive and detailed view of our operations,” explains Eric Blanchot. “All of the departments are involved: HR, finance, processing, etc. A total of 3,000 users. The data are reviewed monthly when the executive committee meets. Customized reports are sent regularly to the various offices: the managing director, regional and territorial managers. Thanks to Talend, they are now speaking the same language.”

“Our work in flow management commits us to developing specific indicators. The same indicators are used to measure the performance of each activity. For example, we are able to forecast the weight in tons of the waste treated and calculate our plant availability threshold (more than 8,000 operational hours per year) or the availability of a truck (on average five turn-around runs per day or more). We monitor our fleet of 10,000 vehicles closely. The average utilization rate is, of course, useful for calculating profitability but it is also useful for organizing their maintenance,” continues Eric Blanchot.

As well as speeding up the development of new interfaces and offering ease of use to non-IT specialists, the company can also highlight savings: “Not only has development time reduced threefold, its cost has too,” concludes Eric Blanchot.

“Talend is present across our business, from the integration of flows in real time to the implementation of a multi-domain MDM: materials, equipment and sites.”

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