Custom Software for a Streamlined Proposal Process

The Customer

REMONDIS is one of the world’s largest private recycling, service and water companies and providing services for around 30 million people. REMONDIS is present in over 30 countries and four continents via its branches and shares in companies. The family-owned company, which was founded in 1934, generates annual sales of 8.2 billion euros (2020) with more than 38.000 employees. REMONDIS makes a significant contribution to protecting the environment and conserving resources across its many business divisions. Starting with the recovery of valuable raw materials from industrial and household waste, to the production of high quality recycling raw materials, to the conversion of non-recyclable residual materials into fuels. Lastly, the company is also increasingly contributing towards the energy transition by using biomass as a source of energy. REMONDIS sees itself as a global contact and advisor for industry, trade and local authorities in order to find regional and individual solutions.

Customer Advantage / Customer Benefit

The use of the app improves the sales processes when it comes to preparation of offers and contracts. Doubled work and manual effort are eliminated or taken over by the app. In addition to the aspects of security and easy handling through drag & drop of text modules, many steps are simplified. For example, a contract can be generated directly from an offer, into which the relevant information is transferred. The customer can digitally sign the document directly on the spot.

Due to the strong technical optimization and simplification of the offer and contract creation, a faster contract closing rate and significantly simpler communication with the customer is possible. Sales no longer has to process the collected requests of the day all at once, but they are already completed on-the-fly by the customer.

The app initially adds to the existing infrastructure in the group and then gradually takes its place. In addition to stabilization, further functional development based on user suggestions will also take place at the same time.

Starting Point and Challenge

The REMONDIS Group wants to provide an application for its supply chain employees in the inside and outside sales that makes it easy to create and edit offers and contracts both on a PC and using a tablet. This will replace an existing solution based on Word macros. The existing solution has some functional and technical limitations that will be addressed by the new application.

Particularly noteworthy in this regard are:

• It takes a long time to open documents, and sales staff are slowed down.
• The existing Word macros are technically outdated and updating it is not possible without massive effort.
• The use of macros should be avoided for security reasons.
• Services already stored in the offer could not be transferred to a contract on the existing Word version.
• The editing of documents is only possible after the actual sales meeting on the main computer. As a result, longer coordination cycles are necessary and contracts are closed later.

Approach

During the development of the application, itemis consistently relied on an agile approach based on Scrum. The usability of the app was ensured by involving the users during development. itemis followed the user-centered development process of DIN EN ISO 9241. Interviews and observations were conducted in order to understand the requirements and needs of the users. itemis used the insights gained to derive requirements for the product. By means of click prototypes, itemis made the ideas tangible and it was possible to obtain and incorporate early feedback from users.

Solution

For the frontend application, ReactNative was used as the base technology, as this allows the different target platforms (Windows - e.g. on a Microsoft Surface - and Android) to be served with a common code base. In addition, the possibility was created to also deploy the same application to iOS devices or for other platforms in the future without significant additional effort.

Users can create uniform offers and contracts by means of the app. Using a building block principle, services can be easily added and customized.

Contracts can then be generated from created offerings without losing data or having to enter it twice. Via digital signatures, contracts can also be signed directly and forwarded by mail to the contract management or back to the customer.

The editor for creating and editing offers and contracts works according to the WYSIWYG principle and thus enables the user to work intuitively. The editor behaves like a web page with a print view function. With the help of two frameworks, what is entered in the editor is converted to a PDF.

Since all functions and the entire range of services are available in the app as building blocks, in the future, offers can be created on site at the customer’s premises and signed directly.