AFRY designs a new IT platform to support Sortera’s end-to-end business flows

Sortera is a prominent recycling company and a leading environmental services provider in Sweden. AFRY has a lot of new ideas for digitising their processes.

The challenge

Sortera was using a third-party application to manage their day-to-day business. It was a legacy application, built with old technologies and was not easy to maintain.  

This product did not satisfy the Sortera end-to-end business needs and contains many unoptimised processes and manual steps. There was a lot of customisations and workarounds to satisfy the business needs that make the application even harder to maintain. The picture got even more complex when Sortera acquire other companies like Bigbag and Åkerisäken as these companies were also using the same product but was configured in quite diverse ways. In addition, it is hard to incorporate innovative ideas into the current process due to system limitations.  

The business process should be optimised, and manual work and other repetitive tasks should be automated, and it should be fun to work with the new system. While doing all this Sortera’s daily business should not be affected at any moment.

The solution

AFRY created a new IT platform to support Sortera’s end2end business flows, where one system is used across different brands in order to create the synergies across different Sortera brands.

The newly built app was always synced with all the instances (configured differently) of the legacy third-party system.  

The main modules we build in Sortera ERP are client management, order management, transport route planning, drivers view, invoicing and financial monitoring. The work was led by the CIO at Sortera.  

The system has been designed and developed to work in an environment with a well-formulated and defined Enterprise architecture. AFRY's delivery team has collaborated with other groups and delivery teams at Sortera where deliveries had a mutual dependency.

The result - better control, more safe and improved user experience

The first version of the application was deployed in production after 3 months. The strategy was to build the application in smaller chunk and put it in production to test it out with real user. It helped to do different experiment and get user feedback at early stage and improve the application based on that.  

We kept moving existing functionalities to the new system one by one and at the same time, we created new functionalities, a better user experience. We followed the continuous delivery and continuous integration approach where we kept deploying changes to the production on regular short intervals.  

In return, we achieve considerable results. Just to mention a few of them, we reduced the time to create new order in the system by one-third, cut costs by reducing the workforce, gave better control and optimisation of different stages of business processes, automated manual work, new employed training time was considerably reduced, better security model, and improved user experience.

Our way of working

“We are running the project with a lean startup approach where we define and test the idea and build the product based on validated learning. We have applied the design thinking approach to understand the problem/business domain and play with different ideas and solution and to get customer feedback to improve them”, says Aamir.

"We have a very good collaboration with AFRY on our digitalisation journey. AFRY supports us with their solid experience of digitisation and adding real value. Together, we not only optimize our processes but also automate tedious tasks and continuously strive for easy-to-work-with systems. We recommend the AFRY team for their commitment, competence, work for quality, and reliability"

Alexander Sunnanvik, CIO Sortera Group