Connex frontrunner in digitalizing mass balance and sustainability reporting

The Dutch company Connex recently put a new custom application into use to support the strongly growing trade in sustainable raw materials for biofuels. Connex uses the new application to maintain 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 delivers renewable raw materials for biofuel worldwide. They focus on waste and residues that fall under waste and veterinary legislation. Both are proven ingredients for good, green-quality biofuel. Thanks to 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 sustainably certified. Transparency in information, documentation, and communication are essential here. Connex knows its way around international policy and legislation in the field of sustainability and is accredited to supply all necessary sustainability documents to its clients.

Certification system

Binding sustainability directives, such as the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) of the European Commission, apply to trading in biomass (raw materials) and producing biofuel. To give substance to these directives, certification systems have been developed by various stakeholders from agriculture, industry, NGOs, and traders. Connex is affiliated with the ISCC certification system. With the help of certification, companies in the value chain can demonstrate that their biomass, biofuels, and other biomass-derived products are sustainable.

For Connex this means they receive sustainability documentation from suppliers for every delivery, including proof of origin. In addition, Connex wants to supply similar documents with sustainability information to its clients for every shipment. To obtain and maintain certification, an audit is carried out annually. This audit checks whether Connex complies with the guidelines regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction, nature conservation, sustainable land use, and other matters. The mass balance is also verified during the audit. You'll read exactly what that is in the next section.

Mass balance

According to ISCC and RED standards, companies must use a balancing system to be able to trace biofuels and raw materials back through the entire chain. This system is called the mass balance. The mass balance is a record in which the incoming and outgoing flows of goods are tracked. For every 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 what emissions were released during the production, processing, and transport of the goods.

Challenges

Connex is a relatively young, fast-growing company. As trading volumes and the number of shipments increase sharply, the number of documents Connex processes also grows. Administering the information in those documents and generating documents for clients was done using Excel and Word. This took increasingly more time, and the chance of errors increased. Because Excel was used for administration, it became increasingly difficult to meet the traceability requirements of the certification bodies, which meant Connex could potentially run into trouble during the annual audit. These challenges led Connex to look for a forward-looking, future-proof custom solution with Mendix.

Purpose of the application

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

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

The result

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

Capturing information

In the application, additional sustainability information about the stock mutations can be recorded, including the origin of the goods, the type of product, and the emissions for production and transport. That information is supplied by suppliers via 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 offers the ability to register supplier certificates. When registering a certificate, the validity period must be entered and it must be specified which products a supplier is certified for. While processing documents supplied by suppliers, the application checks for the presence and validity of those certificates. This way, the application ensures that every shipment meets the required sustainability requirements.

Creating sustainability documents

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

Audit trail

Every action in the application, whether it's a mutation in the mass balance or a document being generated, is automatically tracked in an audit trail, so it's easy to find out who made a change and when. When a change is made in the application, the user can enter a comment to explain the changes. The comment is also visible in the audit trail. This is particularly important when corrections are made to the mass balance, for example when a document turns out to contain errors afterwards and a new document is sent by a supplier.

Data warehouse

All sustainability data recorded in the application is automatically transferred to the data warehouse, so the data can be consulted with 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), meaning the application isn't finished yet. Connex is already thinking about further developing the application to further automate document processing.

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

Why Mendix?

An important characteristic 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 into the application, a connection with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) was built. This allows users to sign in to the application with their Microsoft account.
• Purchase and sales orders are automatically imported from the data warehouse. For this, a direct database connection was built 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 present 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.

These integrations mean all sorts of manual actions are a thing of the past, preventing human errors while also saving a lot of time when processing sustainability documents.

Written by Steven Samuels Brusse
Senior Consultant