Metal recycling for a better planet

BrandPost By David Sweetman, SAP Contributor
May 03, 20234 mins
Digital Transformation

Galloo has transformed ecological metal recycling through automation, integration, and visibility across its business from purchases, transportation, recycling operations, and sales using SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Learn how SAP helped Galloo digitize its business.

Galloo feature image CIO
Credit: Galloo

Galloo is a Western European company headquartered in Belgium, founded in 1939 with the noble purpose of processing discarded consumer goods and factory scrap into useful raw materials. Every year, the company gives a second life to more than 1 million tonnes of steel and more than 60,000 tonnes of metals, ensuring an environmental impact as low as possible. Galloo is a business with a purpose.

The team at Galloo realized that driving recycling efficiency requires careful coordination of resources and timely synchronization of transport, logistics, and operations with available people and resources. It is a flow that requires precision and speed to optimize the processes in order to buy waste materials, manage recycling operations, and sell newly recycled metals with minimal waste and maximum efficiency.

Business with a mission

We often read tag lines from businesses wishing to help the environment. Galloo lives this; their entire existence is focused on just that. The Galloo mission is to ecologically recycle metals – converting waste metal materials into new raw materials in a way that benefits the environment, prevents depleting our scarce resources, and reduces and manages the whole process in a clean way.

Turning old and used into shiny and new with constant innovation

Procuring materials to be recycled is not like buying raw inventory materials of standard sizes, shapes, and configurations. The raw material supply is constantly changing, it requires careful testing in order to comply with ISO standards. Through a careful understanding of the people, processes, machines, and transport, Galloo is now able to optimize utilization and ensure that costs are managed so that the business can be sustainable itself and grow for years to come.

In order to drive a sustainable recycling business, processes require automation and constant management. Without integrated business flows and monitoring of KPIs expensive delays and costs can be incurred. To solve this problem Galloo needed solutions beyond the core SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP and required extended capabilities and integrations enabled through the SAP Business Technology Platform. 

Galloo created extensions in a side-by-side fashion with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP Core using the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). This now enables both standard ERP as well as custom applications to be accessible to them via one single point of entry.  To simplify this, the BTP Portal uses the central launchpad architecture along with SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) to integrate all third-party systems for production and planning.

Galloo now has constant visibility to business performance and flow with the help of the SAP Analytics Cloud to monitor their KPIs. The applications are managed for compatibility across versions and upgrades to ensure data integrity by using the SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

It takes a village

Recycling requires commitment across the supply chain to ensure a virtuous cycle of receiving materials to be recycled, processing, and selling of recycled metals. In the same way, it takes a commitment across the technology landscape to ensure constant innovation, integrity, and flexibility.

Galloo partnered with SAP and Flexso NV, an SAP-certified implementation partner with offices across Belgium, Luxembourg, and Austria. The Flexso depth of understanding of Galloo, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the SAP Business Technology platform provided the needed skills, reassurance, and confidence to make the implementation go smoothly and protect the future needs of Galloo.

Recycling operations must hum as complexities grow

The complexities of recycling grow as new raw material technologies are developed. Battery-powered vehicles, clean processing regulations, global energy costs, and new regulations place demands on recycling companies to be ever more sophisticated in their business operations, compliance, reporting, cost and labor management.

Galloo achieved its goal of digital automation with technology that can now manage processes quickly and securely. By investing in technology, Galloo has control of financial reporting, inventory management, and valuation, ensured regulatory compliance, optimized transport and operations, and used integration and automation to make processes hum.

Future proof sustainability

It is great to see that Galloo can now confidently meet their current and future needs.

For its accomplishments, Galloo has been named a finalist in the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

To learn more about the Galloo Innovation Awards recycling innovations, check out their Innovation Awards pitch deck.