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Reusing, Recycling, Reclaiming

Veolia Environmental Services Technical Solutions breathes new life into its legacy applications

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CUSTOMER: Veolia Environmental Services Technical Solutions HEADQUARTERS: Lombard, Ill. BUSINESS: Environmental services HARDWARE: Power Systems 525 running IBM i and two AS/400 170s SOFTWARE: Custom software from evolveIT Inc. and WebSmart from Business Computer Design (BCD) CHALLENGE: Modernizing and enhancing legacy applications SOLUTION: Working with business partner evolveIT to use WebSmart to develop new applications and tie into existing RPG-based applications

Many companies are talking green these days, but few live up to the word. One company that’s indeed going green is Veolia Environmental Services (ES) Technical Solutions. It helps organizations responsibly dispose of all types of waste, ranging from batteries and metal-bearing sludge, to unused medications and low-level radioactive materials.

And that’s just the short list.

As one might expect, dealing with these items is a delicate task, especially when it comes to transporting them. That’s why Veolia ES Technical Solutions has a rock-solid IT environment in place to help make sure it fulfills its responsibilities, with the final goal of cleaning up the environment.

To that end, Veolia ES Technical Solutions is in the process of migrating sites using an aging AS/400* 170 to a new, beefier Power* Systems 525 running IBM i and its own mission-critical applications. That software could be considered legacy, having been around for “probably 20 years,” according to Dail Earl, manager of business applications and systems engineering. But the company decided to recycle and reuse it rather than throw it away and start again from scratch.

So it’s working with a trusted business partner, evolveIT, to build new applications and create hooks back to its existing RPG-based applications using Business Computer Design’s (BCD’s) WebSmart. Echoing its green business services, it’s not wasting a thing.

A Big Initiative

One of four sister companies, the Lombard, Ill.-based Veolia ES Technical Solutions is a subsidiary of Veolia Environmental Services North America, which itself is a subsidiary of the France-based parent company Veolia Environment. Veolia ES Technical Solutions employs around 1,700 personnel in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

“We try to reclaim, reuse, recycle and dispose of hazardous waste from manufacturing processes, the medical industry or pharmaceuticals. People have stuff, they need to get rid of it and we try to reclaim as much of it as possible,” Earl says. “Green is a big initiative these days, and people want to reuse as much as possible. It’s financially good for them, too.”

Noble aspirations, to be certain, but the logistics behind this reclaiming, reusing and recycling can be daunting. Many government regulations must be dealt with to ensure that various types of waste, especially those that are potentially hazardous, are properly handled. As a result, Veolia ES Technical Solutions has to track every step of the handling and transport of waste materials, “from cradle to grave,” Earl says. “We have to document all of the processing of these materials until they’re either disposed of or made into products to be sold elsewhere.”

This process becomes complicated when one considers that some material containers may have to be consolidated with other containers, added into larger containers, split into smaller containers or dumped into a tank with thousands of gallons of other materials. “I get a headache just thinking about it sometimes,” Earl jokes.

What isn’t a joke, however, is the IT support needed to make sure all of these steps are followed within regulation guidelines. In the case of Veolia ES Technical Solutions, this IT underpinning includes two 170s and the 525. The company is currently in the process of migrating all of its users off the 170s, one of which is still in production and the other of which acts as a backup.

“They came with the purchase of another company, and we’ve been migrating users off of them to the 525 over the past several years,” Earl says. “Originally, we probably had half a dozen sites using those boxes, but we’ve winnowed that down to one, which should make the move to the new box early in 2009.”

When Veolia ES Technical Solutions purchased the other company, it also purchased the 170s and the other company’s applications. But those applications weren’t the same as Veolia ES Technical Solutions’—even though both companies were operating in the same industry. This issue became especially important as Veolia ES Technical Solutions began migrating the sites of the acquired company to the 525. As Earl explains, “They had applications on their systems that we didn’t have, and we had applications on our systems that didn’t have some of the features they had. So we had a number of significant enhancements to do on the 525 to bring everything together.”

If youre switching from RPG to Java or .NET, the learning curve would be very high. Thats not the case with WebSmart. Dail Earl, manager of business applications and systems engineering, Veolia ES Technical Solutions

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