Gasum

The challenge: Real-time load monitoring and invoicing

”We had a need to bring visibility to our day-to-day plant operations and improve activities related to mass flows running through the plant. In autumn 2017, we started a pilot stage with Pinja at one of our plants to solve these needs and then continued to the overall implementation. During 2018, Once by Pinja was already launched at all of our plants in Finland. We use the system to manage our entire circular economy supply chain from waste load reception to fertiliser deliveries and related reporting,” says the Production Planning Manager at Gasum, Anna-Mari Satosalmi

The solution: the introduction of the Once by Pinja system

“Our main need was to automate the invoicing procedure of incoming waste loads; however, it was equally important to be able to monitor loads in real-time, separately for each plant.

Automated monitoring of the Once by Pinja system now enables us to see the current input level of each plant and monitor input entities and storage situation over a desired time range without burdening the plant personnel. It is possible to influence the input amount and storage situation of the plant almost in real-time, and we can now optimise waste loads notably better than before in our plant network. The real-time monitoring of the Once by Pinja system now enables us to see whether the number of incoming waste loads is adequate in relation to the production requirement,” says Satosalmi.

”The greatest benefit comes from automated invoicing”

“Now, the weighing scale directly informs the Once by Pinja system of the tonnage and the type of waste material that a particular customer has delivered. Once a month, Once by Pinja automatically sends the information on customer-specific total loads and related contracts to our invoicing unit. Creating a customer invoice only takes a few clicks, whereas in the past, invoicing could take a week from our work time each month. Today, it is completed in about two days, which means significant savings.

We can also use the customer portal of the system, which offers an easy way of sharing information with our partners and customers. This has reduced the need of monthly reporting by about one person-day per month, since our customers have their own access codes to the system allowing them to view real-time load reports by themselves. Previously, we sent load reports to them manually once a month according to plant-specific weighing scale reports,” Satosalmi says.

”Cooperation with Pinja has been really seamless and flexible”

“Part of our personnel was already familiar with Pinja, and through them we had heard about the good experiences that others had had with them. Our cooperation has also been really seamless and flexible. Work of both parties becomes easier when all things are discussed proactively face-to-face. A thorough analysis of our daily routines was really important and Pinja clearly wanted to find our pain points. It was certainly worth the effort.

The project proceeded really smoothly within the projected schedule, and budgets were not exceeded either. At the biggest corner points, we met face-to-face, but thanks to the proactive procedure, there was no room for any major problems to develop. We had several development projects going on at the same time, to which Pinja was very considerate and they also discussed with the other system suppliers.

In concrete terms, our cooperation has so far included, for example, Once by Pinja user interface and introduction of the system at all of our plants, integration of the Once by Pinja system into our invoicing system, introduction of the customer portal and partly also Once Mobile, which we are currently launching. With the mobile system, the drivers can themselves record loads into the scale system via a mobile phone and no longer need to reach out to the scale terminal from the truck window. We are looking forward to continuing cooperation with Pinja; we have already analysed together our future development needs,” Satosalmi concludes.