Connex frontrunner in digitalizing mass balance and sustainability reporting

Dutch company Connex recently put a new custom application into use to support the rapidly growing trade in sustainable raw materials for biofuels. Connex uses the new application to keep track of its mass balance and to process sustainability documents. E-mergo has been Connex’s IT partner for some time and developed the application with the low-code platform Mendix. In this blog, Senior Consultant Steven Brusse explains what value the application offers Connex, how the application works and what the future plans for the application are.

About Connex

Connex collects, transports and supplies renewable raw materials for biofuel worldwide. The company focuses on waste and residues that fall under waste and veterinary legislation. Both are proven ingredients for good, green-quality biofuel. Thanks to its market knowledge and trading spirit, Connex knows how to find the right, reliable sources of raw materials and deliver them to the right producer or manufacturer. All shipments that Connex collects, moves and delivers are certified sustainable. Transparency in information, documentation and communication is essential here. Connex knows its way around international sustainability policy and legislation and is accredited to supply all required sustainability documents to its customers.

Certification scheme

Trading in biomass (raw materials) and producing biofuel are subject to binding sustainability guidelines such as the European Commission’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED). To put those guidelines into practice, certification schemes have been developed by various stakeholders from agriculture, industry, NGOs and traders. Connex is affiliated with the ISCC certification scheme. Certification enables companies in the value chain to demonstrate that their biomass, biofuels and other biomass-based products are sustainable.

For Connex, this means that it receives sustainability documentation from its suppliers for every delivery, including proof of origin. In addition, Connex wants to provide its customers with similar documents containing sustainability information for every shipment. To obtain and retain certification, an audit is carried out every year. This audit checks whether Connex complies with the guidelines on greenhouse gas emission reduction, nature conservation, sustainable land use and other matters. The mass balance is also verified during the audit. You can read exactly what that is in the next section.

Mass balance

Under the ISCC and RED standards, companies must use a balancing system to be able to trace biofuels and raw materials throughout the entire chain. This system is called the mass balance. The mass balance is an administration that records incoming and outgoing flows of goods. For every type of mutation in the mass balance, it must be recorded who the supplier is, what the origin of the goods is, what type of product it is and which emissions were released during the production, processing and transport of the goods.

Challenges

Connex is a relatively young company that is growing fast. With a sharp increase in trading volumes and number of shipments, the number of documents Connex processes is also growing. Recording the information in those documents and generating documents for customers was done using Excel and Word. This took more and more time and increased the risk of errors. Using Excel for the administration made it increasingly difficult to meet the traceability requirements of the certification bodies, which could potentially get Connex into trouble during the annual audit. These challenges led Connex to look for an innovative, future-proof custom solution built with Mendix.

Purpose of the application

Before development of the application started, we defined the scope of a first version together with Connex in an app-in-a-day session. Five goals were set:

1. Administration of the mass balance
2. Registration of supplier certificates
3. Processing of documents
4. Traceability via an audit trail
5. Reporting on sustainability information

The result

With the new application, Connex can register all relevant information on incoming and outgoing shipments in one administration (the mass balance). The application has a direct connection to the data warehouse, so that inventory mutations resulting from purchases and sales are imported automatically. This data originally comes from Business Central (Connex’s ERP system).

Recording information

Additional sustainability information about the inventory mutations can be recorded in the application, including the origin of the goods, the type of product and the emissions from production and transport. Suppliers provide this information by email in PDF documents. The application automatically reads the documents from a Connex mailbox, after which they can be viewed within the application and the information from the documents can be processed.

User interface

The user interface is optimized for PCs with large screens, so that viewing documents and processing the information from them can take place within a single screen.

Registering supplier certificates

The application makes it possible to register supplier certificates. When registering a certificate, the validity period must be entered and it must be specified for which products a supplier is certified. While processing documents provided by suppliers, the application checks for the presence and validity of those certificates. In this way, the application ensures that every shipment meets the sustainability requirements imposed.

Creating sustainability documents

For all outgoing shipments, Connex creates sustainability documents to send to its customers. The application is used for this as well. Based on the information recorded in the application, PDF documents are generated automatically. All documents, both incoming and outgoing, are uploaded to SharePoint by the application.

Audit trail

Every action in the application, whether it is a mutation in the mass balance or a document being generated, is automatically logged in an audit trail, making it easy to find out who made a change and when. When a change is made in the application, the user can enter a comment explaining the changes. The comment can also be seen in the audit trail. This is particularly important when corrections are made to the mass balance, for example if a document later turns out to contain errors and a supplier sends a new document.

Data warehouse

All sustainability data recorded in the application is automatically transferred to the data warehouse, so that the data can be consulted in Power BI in the form of dashboards and operational reports.

Future plans

The Mendix application was initially developed for Connex employees. The first version of the application went into use in October. This version was developed as a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), which means the application is not finished yet. Connex is already thinking about further development of the application to automate document processing even more.

To achieve this, we are investigating whether the information in the received PDF documents can be processed automatically by Mendix using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and AI. Connex also plans to eventually add new user roles to the application, so that external users (suppliers and customers) gain access to the information in the application. This could make the exchange of documents by email completely unnecessary.

Why Mendix?

An important feature of low-code tools, and Mendix in particular, is the ability to build integrations with external systems. The openness of the Mendix platform and the flexibility Mendix offers for building integrations were decisive in choosing Mendix. The application has the following integrations:

• For logging in to the application, an integration with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) has been built. Users can therefore sign in to the application with their Microsoft account.
• Purchase and sales orders are imported automatically from the data warehouse. For this, a direct database connection has been set up with a SQL Server database in Microsoft Azure.
• Emails with PDF attachments are automatically read into the application from a shared mailbox in Microsoft 365.
• PDF documents created in the application are automatically uploaded to a SharePoint site in Connex’s Azure tenant.
• Datasets in the application are published by Mendix via an API as OData endpoints. These datasets are read by TimeXtender to import the data into the data warehouse.

Thanks to these integrations, all kinds of manual tasks are a thing of the past, which prevents human error while saving a lot of time when processing sustainability documents.

Want to know more?

Does your organization also deal with certifications and sustainability laws and regulations? Or has this blog inspired you about low-code application development with Mendix and would you like to know more about the possibilities for your organization? Then get in touch with us.

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