Scanmetals may have only been around since 2009, but in just over a decade, it has earned a remarkable and prestigious position with facilities in Scandinavia, Germany, the UK and Portugal.

Ernst & Young in Denmark has twice awarded the manufacturing company the "EY Entrepreneur Of The Year" innovation prize in 2018 and 2020. The recognition stemmed from Scanmetals' innovative approach and effective solutions for extracting metals from waste incineration plants for recycling ‒ benefiting both the environment and manufacturers.

Despite its status as a leader in its field, this recycling specialist faced a challenge that made their work more cumbersome.

"Our aging IT system made it difficult for our accounting department to calculate what we wanted. We also wanted to reduce the number of work hours spent manually calculating cost prices, which has been a daily struggle for years," says Scanmetals CIO, Lars Viggo Hvolbøll.

It's important to know the cost price because it indicates the value of goods. The challenge of managing cost prices meant that the recycling specialist's accounting department had to make manual corrections for the entire month on all item numbers to align the cost prices. The necessity of getting the calculation right becomes even more crucial when considering that the manufacturing company often has orders for several hundred tons, with deliveries ranging from 20,000 to 30,000 kilograms, with pricing per kilogram.

"If we miss the mark by just a few cents with such large orders, it results in a significant error, giving a misleading picture of our inventory cost," explains the CIO."

Scanmetals embarks on a new era with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

When Lars Viggo Hvolbøll took on the role of CIO at Scanmetals in 2019, he immediately set out to devise a new IT strategy aimed at modernizing and standardizing the company's IT systems. This included replacing several different outdated IT systems with a cloud-based ERP system that included a common data platform.

After careful consideration, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, delivered by Cepheo, was selected.

"We chose Business Central because it allows us to run the same system across borders. We are also moving away from local servers, making data access easier from any location and enabling more straightforward scalability," he explains.

The manufacturing company made a wise choice, as the ERP system enables full control and real-time insight into all business processes. Business Central integrates and streamlines all aspects of the recycling specialist's production process, including inventory, distribution and accounting.

Business Central has been implemented in Denmark and the UK, with the rollout still underway at Scanmetals' other locations, so the company has yet to fully realize the value of the new system. Nevertheless, Lars Viggo Hvolbøll points out that the ERP system is already making tasks easier for employees, increasing work efficiency.

This is particularly evident in the accounting department, where the manual work associated with cost prices has been reduced by a more streamlined processes. Previously, accountants had to navigate a cumbersome path into the system through a Citrix solution. Now, it only takes a few clicks to start working in Business Central.

The ERP system also helps realize the goal of expanding with additional factories in Europe, according to the CIO.

"With Business Central, we can expand more rapidly abroad without IT holding us back. All it takes is a server in the cloud, and the group has access to data regardless of the factory's location. This makes the process more agile and faster, allowing us to focus on other tasks. Business Central also makes it easier to comply with tax reporting requirements set by various governments," he adds.

In the coming period, Lars Viggo Hvolbøll plans to explore the ERP system's functionalities further to maximize the return on the investment in Business Central. One of the projects is to standardize and streamline the group's work processes, with Cepheo playing a role in configuration and setup, as well as providing guidance and expertise.

One step closer to becoming a data-driven company

The CIO explains that there were several reasons why Scanmetals chose Cepheo as their IT provider for Business Central.

"Cepheo understood our business and challenges on a level we lacked from our previous IT provider. We had a good dialogue and received some inspiring insights on how to tackle challenges in a different way than we had tried before," he says.

The next step on their IT journey is to dig into the company's data. Here, solutions like Microsoft DataVerse and Microsoft Power BI play essential roles because, together, they create the right platform for storing, visualizing and analyzing data. This allows the manufacturing company's employees to base their decisions on data rather than assumptions.

This hasn't been possible for Scanmetals until now, according to the CIO.

"It helps us a lot that our IT setup is more straightforward. Having Business Central in the cloud also makes working with data more manageable. I have high hopes for the future.