Visy built two apps and integrations with its SAP ERP system to meet its obligations as one of three zone operators of Victoria’s container deposit scheme.
Visy’s Tim O’Donnell.
The company operates the ‘North zone’ for the 10c single-use beverage container recycling scheme in Victoria, which runs from the “inner north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne” and beyond.
Containers can be returned to a depot, over the counter at specified retail locations, or to automated reverse vending machines, which are shipping container-sized machines often found in carparks.
Supporting Visy’s role in the container deposit scheme are two apps – one for consumers and one for use by over-the-counter redemption points, which recover containers from the public, general manager of container deposit schemes Tim O’Donnell told an Appian Around The World (AATW) summit.
O’Donnell said that Visy had a long-standing relationship with Appian, with the low-code platform underpinning a number of apps used to manage regular recycling pickups from businesses, truck run sheets, and the acquisition of waste materials for recycling.
Appian emerged as the frontrunner to underpin the “IT applications needed to support the operational functions of the” container deposit scheme, in part because these new apps had to integrate with existing Appian-based applications.
Accustomed to business-to-business (B2B) operations, becoming a zone operator in the container deposit scheme introduced a business-to-consumer (B2C) aspect to Visy’s business for the first time.
This is managed through the ‘CDS Vic North App’, built on Appian, which consumers can use to receive electronic payments for recycling their beverage containers.
“With the consumer, we need to be able to register their identity to quite a low level and then facilitate digital payments [to them],” O’Donnell said.
“Once we’ve got that registration, we can record a bank account for settlement of the EFT payments, which can be either via bank account BSB or PayID.”
Alternatively, consumers can elect – via the app – to donate the funds instead to a registered charity.
A barcode in the app is used to identify a consumer at the container collection point.
“In order to make that connection between the customer and the machine or the app, there’s a requirement to put a barcode there that can be scanned to pass that piece of information between the two devices,” O’Donnell said.
A second app, also built with Appian, is used by manual redemption points to record the number and type of containers they recover and refund.
This app also helps redemption point operators meet their “obligation to provide a weekly acknowledgement that what they’ve entered in the app is true and correct, record any safety or environmental incidents, and ensure that their opening hours have been met.”
Finally, O’Donnell noted that the two apps needed to be integrated with some of the company’s existing application portfolio built on Appian, and also with its enterprise resource planning system SAP to reconcile payments for the returned beverage containers.
O’Donnell said there were eight months between kick-off to delivery of the apps and integrations.
Teams from Visy and Appian worked collaboratively onsite at Visy Recycling’s “IT head office” in Coburg in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
“We [also] engaged Appian [for] hypercare as well post-commencement to make sure that we had the support for anything that was unexpected, given it was a big bang turn-on all in one day,” O’Donnell said.
Eleven months in, Visy said it had “over 100,000” people in its zone interacting with the scheme, out of a possible 200,000 users.