Svenska Retursystem or SRS, is a company that provides a sustainable way of handling food crates and pallets for the Swedish food industry. The company is owned by the largest FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) companies in Sweden, including ICA, COOP, Bergendahl, and Axfood.
The idea behind SRS is that the industry should be reusing durable crates and pallets. It’s a circular and environmentally conscious system with a mission to organise the supply chain of food and beverage. It eliminates waste and employs a list of practices that make it a part of the efforts to reduce the impact on climate. Food consumption is responsible for 30 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. According to data available on the SRS website, in 2022 the industry saved more than 36,400 tons of carbon dioxide by using their crates and pallets.
The SRS Challenge
To sustain this kind of business model it was crucial to have data on the whereabouts of the crates and pallets. This meant that SRS had to know their physical location, movement habits, and condition, as well as have a system in place to track their behaviour. This would mean having full control and digitalising the logistics, which until that point had been based on manual processes.
They needed a long-term partner that could help them digitalise the supply chain process in an agile and flexible way. This would include support and maintenance services to make sure the system is working properly after it goes live.
Enter Polar Cape
The partnership between Polar Cape and SRS was established in 2016 and our consultants have been making a valuable impact on their team since then. The average team size is between 7 and 10 consultants. Some of the expertise that Polar Cape has provided are an Agile Team Lead, Solution Architect, Back- and Front-End Developers, UI/UX Designers, QA Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Support Engineers and Data Scientists. Each new consultant that joins the team receives proper onboarding, so that they are immediately ready to contribute to the project.
Polar Cape assembled an agile development team that helped develop the Smart Pooling platform. This involved leveraging cutting-edge tools and technologies, to enable efficient software delivery and infrastructure management. This resulted in a responsive web application, built with a mobile-first approach. The end user of this application can track the crates and pallets and be aware of their condition and behaviours. They can also order crates and pallets, find information about prices on various offers, easily create and approve transactions, etc.
Success Factors
One of the key factors that makes our work with SRS a success story is the adopted team-centric approach. This means that all team members share the company goals. For this to happen, team members from all levels need to establish a close collaboration. This includes the Polar Cape consultants, as well. We share a mindset, between SRS and Polar Cape, when it comes to succeeding together. We make a great team that sees the big picture and doesn’t simply complete tasks by following instructions.
To Conclude
The cooperation between SRS and Polar Cape is strategic and long-term. During our time together, Polar Cape has played a proactive role in the innovation processes at SRS. For example, Polar Cape has led an inspirational seminar in machine learning, which has led to optimising customer order prediction.
