L&T: Towards circular economy and efficiency

To make circular economy a reality, L&T wants to offer its customers digital services that enable sustainable development through efficiency. The first step is to help the customers turn to digital rather than traditional channels for service and support. This requires creating useful and lovable products, which in turn decreases manual workload, strengthens abilities, increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, and produces more data. Concurrently, the sustainability numbers need to be transparent, reliable, and up-to-date, in other words, measured and monitored efficiently.

With their sustainability reporting, many larger companies are accountable for data from multiple sources. This makes manually collecting and sharing the data time-consuming, difficult, and prone to human error. Instead, L&T wanted to offer ways to automate the process and help its customers to start using the data to make more informed decisions and drive continuous improvement.

We’ve helped L&T create various successful digital services, such as

• Ympäristönetti, a self-service portal that allows to monitor waste management data and environmental impact on a detailed level
• Oma L&T for following waste management service delivery and placing orders, and
• Raksanappi for ordering services to construction sites, along with the sorting plan in a handy electronic format and the instructions available in six languages.

In continuation, we improved Ympäristönetti, adapting it to the latest reporting standards and creating an Application Programming Interface (API) from which L&T’s customers can get their own sustainability data for integrating the data streams from L&T into their reporting systems. The API uses the same data as Ympäristönetti, so the customers can choose the most suitable tools for them. Additionally, we designed an insights feature, which sends L&T’s customers notifications and practical advice on how to improve their waste management and sustainability operations.

All of these products are continuously improved and expanded in close collaboration between business, design, and development. Together with L&T’s team and a chosen client, we identify the needs and then proceed to technical design, proof of concept, pilot, and productization. Our build and design team works closely with L&T’s dedicated product owners, using a process that follows Scrum principles and adapts to the latest needs. The product owners have excellent knowledge of their business domain and are committed to the products and process, which has been one of the keys to success.

Oma L&T portal lets the customers track and manage their waste management, see the weekly and monthly calendars, and keep track of future and past orders. On construction sites, Raksanappi helps manage the deliveries, emptying, and picking-up of the waste bins, and follow the progress of the orders in almost real time. With Ympäristönetti, L&T’s customers are able to monitor their company’s waste management data on a dashboard – anywhere and anytime. It helps to lead with knowledge, turn environmental responsibility to competitive advantage and make communicating and reporting easy and impactful.

The fundamental impact of our digitalization work is making L&T customers’ lives easier with easy access to the services and data, and simultaneously decreasing the number of repetitive tasks on customer support. This results in faster service and increased customer satisfaction. Enabling automated access to sustainability data is another step towards the same direction. We removed the need for manual data collection from the sustainability managers, so that they can focus on strategic activities. All in all, automated sustainability data reporting with notifications and practical advice is a concrete step towards circular economy – a prerequisite for future-proof companies.

The process has also been a cultural transformation. By adapting our agile ways of working, L&T’s international development team is able to work together more efficiently, predictively, and transparently.