SUEZ Accelerates Solutions for the Circular Economy

Transitioning to a Circular Economy Requires Agile Technology

SUEZ has delivered essential services that protect and improve the quality of life for over 160 years. In 2021, SUEZ produced drinking water for 66 million people and sanitation services for more than 33 million people.

As the planet faces growing environmental challenges, all businesses need to reduce their environmental impact. And SUEZ, a global player in water and waste services, plays a crucial role in the transition to a circular economy, helping its clients to recycle more waste, reduce resource usage, and emit less CO₂.

SUEZ Circular Solutions develops digitally-enabled business propositions to encourage clients to accelerate their transition to the circular economy.

“Building new business propositions for the circular economy is an experimental process,” explains Antoine Le Feuvre, CEO at SUEZ Circular Solutions. “That’s why we embraced low-code application development. We need to get to market with new digital solutions quickly and cost-effectively so we can test them with customers. Moreover, we need to refine and adjust them quickly, especially as we roll out to more organizations."

These requirements led SUEZ to select OutSystems as its high-performance low-code platform. Selection criteria included an industry-standard architecture and the ability to rapidly and cost-effectively scale multi-tenant solutions as an ISV serving numerous customers.

Building SludgeAdvanced in Five Months

SludgeAdvanced was one of three development projects the SUEZ Circular Solutions team built in its first year as an OutSystems customer. Julie Klein, who leads the marketplace and traceability team reporting to Antoine, takes up the story.

"We had a demanding customer requirement to deliver in five months. So fast time to market was crucial and made OutSystems stand out as the technology to use."

Julie Klein

Digital Offer Manager, SUEZ Circular Solutions

SUEZ had previously developed a basic version of SludgeAdvanced using traditional development. But the need to accelerate development to meet customer expectations and anticipate future market demand caused SUEZ to start afresh on OutSystems. SUEZ chose OutSystems partner Devoteam as its development partner.

“We had an extensive list of requirements for version two of SludgeAdvanced,” says Julie. “We were creating a much more mature product, with many more features to suit multiple customers. That makes it hard to compare the development of version one to version two. But even so, we cut delivery time down from six months to five.”
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To deliver this medium complexity application, with a web portal and a reporting platform, the Devoteam project team included nine developers, a tech lead, one business analyst, and a project director. SUEZ project team members included Julie as project director, a product owner and assistant, and oversight from an enterprise architect and Antoine.

“During development, we had to embrace an agile way of working with the Devoteam OutSystems developers based in Portugal,” explains Julie. “We found that using OutSystems kept our business stakeholders more closely involved with developers due to the speed of development and the need for constant feedback. We were very impressed by the commitment and expertise of the Devoteam developers throughout the project.”

SludgeAdvanced Revolutionizes the Traceability of Wastewater Sludge

SUEZ provides the SludgeAdvanced application as a SaaS solution to municipalities and industrial companies. Users include municipality staff, farmers, wastewater treatment plant operators, laboratories, and delivery drivers. The solution streamlines the end-to-end process of turning wastewater sludge into valuable agricultural fertilizer, thereby turning a waste product into an ecological benefit.

Encouraging farmers to use fewer chemicals on the land reduces resource depletion, costs, pollution, energy consumption, and CO₂ emissions. SludgeAdvanced encourages this transition by making the process easier and transparent for all stakeholders.

The application meets the stringent traceability compliance requirements at every step of the value chain—recovering, treating, selling, transporting, and spreading finished fertilizer and compost products.

SludgeAdvanced is the first product to use CircularChain, a traceability platform for the circular economy previously developed by SUEZ. It is secured by a blockchain, to provide immutable proof along the value chain, meeting French circular economy regulatory requirements.
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The application also supports the complex stock management requirements for sludge byproducts, as there are specific timeframes when farmers can spread sludge-based fertilizer on the land.

In France alone, using sludge-based agricultural fertilizer avoids producing 35,000 tons of synthetic nitrogen per year and mining 30,000 tons of phosphorus.

With two other products already in development, OutSystems provides SUEZ the speed and agility to successfully support numerous innovations with digital products that serve employees, business partners, and customers.