
MerQbiz
MerQbiz, an analytics company based in El Segundo, California, that serves the recovered paper supply chain, has launched a new generation of its BaleVision quality assessment and analytics product suite. The launch includes data products with deeper insights into quality and procurement to inform buyers and sellers on quality and cost factors related to recovered paper.
The initial analytics dashboards launched in 2019 show the contamination breakdown of each paper bale measured, along with fiber yield, material cost per ton and landed cost per ton. Building on this foundation, MerQbiz has expanded the solution’s modeling capabilities to find correlations between supplier performance, location data, contamination type, return on investment and other actionable information. Examples of new features include:
- supplier ranking dashboards in which the buyer can view side-by-side comparisons of supplier costs and yields;
- contamination ranking revealing types of contamination (i.e., moisture, plastic, ash) by supplier and location;
- localization capabilities that allow the product to be localized based on currency, language and custom;
- deductions report, which looks at individual probe readings and suggests cost adjustments for high-contamination bales, translating downgrades into real costs savings;
- impact dashboards, enabling users to calculate their return on investment for fiber sales or procurement; and
- a scenario planning tool that uses historical data to recommend a purchase plan per supplier and the projected financial and environmental impact.
“At its core, BaleVision is a data engine that aggregates and analyzes data points from a variety of sources—customers, industry databases, weather experts, government entities—giving users valuable insights,” says John Fox, president and CEO of MerQbiz. “As we continually add data collected through on-site audits, integrate external data sets and improve the usability of our dashboards, the system becomes ever more powerful and smarter for our customers.”
According to a news release from MerQbiz, the new releases use outside datasets, including market pricing indexes, real-time fuel prices for logistics calculation and weather data across geographic regions. This data is instrumental in helping customers gain a clearer picture of their recovered paper quality and costs.
The company says it offers multiple options for the setup and release of customer data related to recovered paper supply and procurement. Chris Brandsey, chief product officer at MerQbiz, says the company works with each customer to determine the best approach.
“BaleVision can attach to the customer’s ERP system and pull data daily to mimic a real-time experience, or the customer can opt to download their data to a spreadsheet and upload to the BaleVision system as frequently as they like.”
The BaleVision platform was built using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to ensure system stability, security and data privacy.
MerQbiz is a sole venture of German equipment company Voith GmbH.
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