Tirme: An efficient, environmentally advance public service hand in hand with Google Cloud
About Tirme
Tirme is a public utility company that manages Mallorca's urban and assimilable waste, contracted by the Consell de Mallorca, the island's governing council. Since being awarded the contract in 1992, the company has been developing and working on establishing three waste management plans as part of a sustainable model geared toward a circular economy and zero waste, all of which are now considered benchmarks throughout Europe and across the globe.
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Contact usThe company in charge of waste circularity in Mallorca has strengthened its commitment to citizenship and sustainability thanks to its digital transformation in the cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Creation of a data warehouse, resulting in synchronized, democratized data across the company
- Savings in resources and reduced cost per ton, ensuring lower rates for the residents of Mallorca
- Employees can now see the entire production process in real time using Looker Studio and BigQuery
- Staff (FTE) performance and management optimized by 25%
- Sustainability: ability to monitor and reduce the company's carbon footprint
Early detection of process improvements
Tirme is the company in charge of managing urban and assimilable waste on the island of Mallorca. Since being awarded the contract in 1992 by the Consell de Mallorca, the island's governing council, Tirme has had innovation as its flagship, continuing to develop in terms of sustainability and digitization in order to meet the needs of Mallorca's residents.
More than just a waste company
Tirme is a company centered around the principles of a circular economy in which waste is not destroyed but rather transformed in the best way possible. The company's management model is oriented toward recovering materials and energy from more than 700,000 tons of urban and assimilable waste so it can be given a new lease of life. Around 70% of this waste is used to obtain enough energy to supply 80,000 homes, and 30% is recycled. This commitment to sustainability allowed Tirme to reach its goal of zero waste in Mallorca in 2010, helping not only to protect the environment but also one of Spain's top tourist destinations.
"We just needed a push in the right direction when it came to digitizing the company. Whenever we needed to submit a report externally, having to search the spreadsheet for data was like looking for a needle in a haystack."
—Jesús Marí, Project Manager at TirmeTo succeed in this important mission, the 300 employees that work across the 17 facilities must collaborate, using up-to-date and reliable information to inform circular processes. However, data organization used to be an inaccurate, manual process.
Goodbye on-premises architecture, hello cloud computing
For many years, Tirme's software architecture was on-premises. As a consequence, information was held in various data silos, and everyone gathered their own data based on the tons of waste treated. Then, each employee would have to phone or request a document via email to obtain the information they needed. As such, data was collected on paper, in spreadsheets, dashboards, or presentations, all of which took valuable time—arguably one of the most precious resources a company has at its disposal.
Furthermore, without daily reporting, information was often relayed far later than necessary. As a result, the company would be faced with situations that ran over several months, with plenty of scope for improvement. Likewise, if the data from one silo was in the process of being updated, any employees who had phoned or emailed requesting the information wouldn't be notified, which meant that old data was being used for KPI reporting.
All this resulted in a need to digitize.
A public service made more efficient thanks to the cloud
In 2018, Tirme began assessing the possibility of incorporating a cloud-based service to create a corporate data warehouse. To do this, the company evaluated the available platforms based on various criteria, including the platforms' documentation and its sustainability, as well as the information it offered, its CO2 impact, and its ease of use. Tirme also knew it needed a partner that would help address and support the company's drive toward digital transformation. Google Cloud well and truly fit the bill.
"With sustainability and the principles of a circular economy at our company's core, we needed a partner that shared these values. That's where Google Cloud really stood out."
—Albert Pozuelo, CIO of TirmeTirme has been working with Google Cloud since June 2022. Google Cloud's capacity for gathering and measuring data enabled the company to identify opportunities where the life cycle of products could be optimized in an effort to consume fewer resources and lower the cost per ton. In other words, data monitoring and analytics resulted in substantial savings due to the early detection of incidents and instances of high consumption that would have otherwise gone unnoticed for several months. This, in turn, helps Tirme to ensure that the cost-per-ton rates paid by Mallorca's residents are as low as possible.
The company's digital transformation also led to improvements in time management. Since partnering with Google Cloud, Tirme's processes have been optimized 30% more than expected. As a result, the company has gained 465 hours, which its employees can now spend analyzing processes. However, this figure is by no means fixed. By the end of 2023, optimization is set to increase once Google Cloud has been rolled out across all departments, exceeding the 1,552 hours gained and 3,534 hours forecast.
Furthermore, the ability to create dashboards using the AI tool Looker Studio, as well as being able to store data in BigQuery, enabled data to be democratized across the company. Employees can now view the entire production process in real time, which means they're able to check that the plant is working within the efficiency parameters. They can also manage the resources that each plant consumes, the waste that goes in, and the products that come out, together with a general overview of the whole facility, among other performance indicators. And if there's a process that can be improved, the same report can be used to identify the root cause and make quick decisions. This not only leads to more responsible consumption, but employees can also view the progress of any improvements that have been implemented.
Tirme's digital transformation has also brought about positive environmental impacts. The ability afforded by Google Cloud to view and track the gross carbon emissions that result from using the platform via the Carbon Sense suite meant IT teams could calculate and improve their carbon footprint in each process.
What's more, partnering with a green region like Google Cloud—which is also a firm advocate for sustainability and the circular economy—to help support the company's digital transformation turned out to be a perfect match in terms of protecting the environment. Thanks to having chosen Google Cloud, a carbon-neutral region, Tirme was able to reduce its carbon footprint.
The added value of an "ecosystem of tools"
As with any public service associated with energy and the energy industry, Tirme has to process large volumes of data on a daily basis. With its petabyte capacity and potential for future scalability, Google Cloud inevitably became a strategic ally for the company. Moreover, the layers in BigQuery were incredibly helpful in ensuring that the digital transformation took place organically and that the project's objective was achieved.
Nevertheless, Tirme needed something more than just data storage. The company had to be able to stay up to date with AI developments in order to make predictions. Google Cloud therefore gave them access to machine learning, which could be incorporated into the warehouse, without having to rely on an external provider. This enabled Tirme to generate predictive models with SQL that could be fully integrated within BigQuery and the data sets.
"When you use it, you can really see a difference compared to other clouds. We knew it was going to be an investment, but now the data warehouse is fully up and running, its value and gains in terms of ROI are clear to see."
—Jesús Marí, Project Manager at TirmeGoogle Cloud also afforded the company access to Document AI, a tool equipped with models that are pre-trained to mine data. Tirme began using this tool to extract information from the 150+ PDFs that the company receives from external laboratories each month—analysis that is crucial to ensuring the company's efficiency. This meant employees stopped having to manually load data into spreadsheets, increasing agility as a result.
Google Cloud thus offered Tirme a turnkey solution capable of accelerating the company's digital transformation with its extensive range of products and embedded AI.
Tirme and Google Cloud today
Today, Tirme is working on building a single database in BigQuery. While it's a complex process, the cloud-based architecture is helping to facilitate this transition. As a result, at the time of writing, approximately 60% of the data and around 2 TB is estimated to have already been stored.
Employees are also incorporating other Workspace tools, such as Google Docs and Google Sheets, with the aim of rolling them out in 2023, as well as continuing to work with Looker Studio, Vertex AI, and ML.
With the help of Google Cloud, Tirme's investment in technology has been, is, and will be key to the company's ability to keep on providing an efficient and environmentally progressive public service that effectively manages Mallorca's waste.
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About Tirme
Tirme is a public utility company that manages Mallorca's urban and assimilable waste, contracted by the Consell de Mallorca, the island's governing council. Since being awarded the contract in 1992, the company has been developing and working on establishing three waste management plans as part of a sustainable model geared toward a circular economy and zero waste, all of which are now considered benchmarks throughout Europe and across the globe.