Cleaning up Queensland one bottle at a time: SaaSam developed an intuitive system for COEX to support their recycling scheme

COEX is a not-for-profit based in Queensland, Australia that administers and governs the Queensland Beverage Container Refund Scheme.

Under the Waste Recycling Act 2011, COEX is the Product Responsibility Organisation (PRO) and has all the corresponding powers, rights and obligations, with the primary function being to ensure that empty beverage containers are not littered or put into landfill.

COEX’s goals are to increase beverage container recycling recovery rates to 79% by July 2021 and 85% by July 2022.

COEX engages with numerous stakeholders to ensure that empty beverage containers are collected, transported and processed for sale. It facilitates this process by contracting separately with each limb of the Scheme’s circular economy, i.e. beverage manufacturers, container refund points, logistics services providers, processing service providers, material recovery facilities and recycling panel members.

“As the appointed Product Responsibility Organisation, COEX was answerable to the Queensland government, but also to the beverage industry and the general public,” explains Morgan Brennan, COEX commercial manager.

“As a result, COEX needed an airtight contract management system which, first and foremost,
stored all executed container recovery agreements in a central repository. The container recovery agreements provide COEX’s revenue and therefore are a critical building block.”

Because COEX is a start-up, there were no contract management processes in place, so the search began for a contract lifecycle management system that provided standard term contracts:

“The Scheme is underpinned by volumes of containers through our Business Portal, so there is a
subsequent high-volume customer relationship element to the business needs,” says Morgan.

SaaSam and Agiloft were there right from the start, with Carol Prior, project manager for SaaSam, working on the initial implementation in 2018 as well as all subsequent enhancements to the solution.

Although the start date was delayed due to pending government processes and approvals, the ‘go-live’ date remained the same and on 31 July the system was operational for entity, contact registration and contract request. Contract generation and signing commenced in September.
COEX’s new system is a self-service portal where external contractors create a login and
register their interest in the Scheme via the solution’s portal.

The COEX Commercial Team are automatically notified by the contract management system
(CMS) to review the registration and contract request details and, where appropriate, issue a
contract for signing.

Security in the system is critical, with Agiloft managing confidential documentation. Another level of complexity is added because company contacts may be associated as directors of multiple companies and, therefore, those contacts needed to be available for sharing.

The CMS solution is integrated with DocuSign for e-signing of the contract, with the final signed copy of the contract (in PDF format) returned into the CMS and the contract status updated to ‘Active’.

“Recently, we added enhancements to the solution to enable contractors and exporters to review and update their annual sales and export volumes as part of their annual reporting requirements, and for custom reports to management of the annual volumes,” Morgan elaborates.

The solution is based around Agiloft’s contract, contract types, companies and people tables, and is supported by several custom tables and custom configurations, including around 300 calculation fields to support annual sales and export volumes reporting.

More system developments are scheduled, including enhancing the system to support exporters
and recyclers in addition to the current beverage manufacturers.

Now that the new system is firmly up and running, Morgan says the benefits in terms of simplicity and time savings are clear: “The contract process is easy and is done start-to-finish by one contract manager. COEX has a central repository of executed agreements – this is so valuable to a start-up organisation.”

“Each year, our contractors are required to complete and return a statutory declaration that confirms their sales volumes for the previous financial year,” explains Morgan.

“This document was autogenerated through Agiloft’s portal and was a great success – with over 99% of volume verified through the statutory declaration portal.”

SaaSam looks forward to supporting COEX with their ongoing developments and seeing the increases in efficiency as the organisation continues to support the Queensland government initiatives.