Full Story
During the early 1990s, the U.K. scrap market was going through a turbulent period. A great number of small scrap companies had been slowly expanding over the years and several mergers took place. One of the new companies that emerged was Mayer Parry Recycling, whose most important partners were the Co-Steel Sheerness Company, the Parry Metals Group, and Mayer Newman. As the new group had seven scrap yards across the U.K., the need was felt to start managing these companies in a more professional way, for instance the way a steelworks was run. It was decided to develop a management system that would be able to store data from all sites into one coherent system. Searching for a man who could carry out this huge task, the company came across Robert Horan, who had worked for 4 years designing and developing systems for the steel industry, took Mayer Parry's offer and in February 1992 he started his job as Manager Information Technology, heading a team of four people. .

Computerless
What Horan found when he took stock of Mayer Parry's automation, was quite disappointing - it turned out that the company was to a large extent computerless.
'We started off by looking at what systems were about in the market,' recalls Horan, 'and discovered that there were only antiquated DOS-based systems available, but not one software system that was pointed specifically for recycling companies. All that the existing management software companies had done was take a standard stock control or inventory system and bolted on a few recycling- specifics. No one had really built a recycling program from the ground up. Even today, some of our competitors do still not address the production side of a recycling company. They still do not go further than counting the purchasing and the inventory.'
Seeing that there was nothing suitable in the market, Horan decided to develop a completely new management information system that was tailor-made for a metals recycling company.
'We wanted to make a system that was above all easy to use, because, at that time, only few scrap companies were using computers on a large scale, and there were a lot of computer-illiterates out there. We made it Windows-based, as this was rapidly becoming the world standard,' says Horan. 'We started off with some ten PCs and today we have 230 operating within one, fully integrated network for the 21 locations of the Mayer Parry Group, including e-mail and all the rest of it.'

Marketing the system
When the Materials Manager was completed and was running to everyone's satisfaction, the thought came up of marketing the system, and thus earn back the development costs. That decision was the start of a new company called Mayer Information Technology (MIT) in 1998.
Horan recalls that period. 'We evaluated the market to see what systems were there and who we would be up against in the software business, and found out there was a fundamental difference between us and other management software systems in the market. Most of the existing systems are more or less all based on existing trading, accounting and inventory based systems which you can buy anywhere of the shelf, and then slightly modified and repackaged. Our Materials Manager is developed from a recycling perspective - to provide information for a recycler. Using our system, a recycling company is able to run their entire business more efficiently. It is a complete recycling management system. It not only manages and controls purchases, sales, inventory, and billing, but also the whole production at a yard. That is a unique feature.'

Business tool
A system such as the Materials Manager does not come cheaply. It's a big package system for the bigger companies that want to grow and are not scared of the costs. The base system is suited for 5 users, but it can be extended to a multi-site system for hundreds of users.
'The Materials Manager is a system for extracting the information needed to make decisions. It is a business tool, not an accounting package,' explains Horan. The system has an "open license" - purely based on the number of people accessing the system. That is the sole basis for our pricing. It does not matter how many sites the system runs over, nor how many servers it runs over, nor whether a company runs Oracle in one location and Sybase in another. Our system is flexible, compatible with many existing systems, and it is easy to upgrade and enhance existing systems.'
According to Horan, he was surprised about the interest large U.S. metals recycling showed for the Materials Manager when it was presented at the ISRI Convention in Orlando this year. 'We thought they would already have installed control and management systems, but it turned out that was not the case. Many of them are now coming to the U.K. to see our production management system in action.'
During the last five years, the system has enhanced greatly. As the Co-Steel Group itself became involved in the recycling business in the U.S. and Canada, these subsidiaries also implemented the Materials Manager, later followed by Gallatin Steel in Kentucky.
'That was a difference to us,' says Horan, 'because initially we only had to support our own internal people. Now we suddenly also had to support people that we were not aware of, but the system had to operate in a for us new, North American market. As a result, we had to introduce elements such as different measuring systems like kilos and pounds, and short tons and metric tonnes, which had to be converted. But it was no problem fitting that in.'
The Materials manager is an internationally usable system, available in English, but also in other languages such as French and Portuguese. It can easily be converted to other languages.

Updating and service
The advantage of being part of a recycling group of companies is that Mayer IT still get positive feedback from the people who work in the yards, and lately also from customers. 'They come up with suggestion for improvements that we incorporate in our system. We make a lot of those changes free of charge for our customers and later we incorporate it in the system, so that everyone benefits from that enhancement,' says Horan.
He stresses that the additional costs for the system hardware, implementation, updating, and service - are very low when compared with other companies. 'Implementation is carried out by some key people who, in turn, can train others. That saves money and leaves us more time to concentrate on developing the system, rather than occupy ourselves with training and implementation. And
we provides free telephone support around the clock around the world.'
Currently, Mayer IT employs 9 people in the U.K. who are engaged in in-house product development, service and sales. For serving the North American market, it is developing partnerships with North American companies for which is handling support and implementation at the other side of the ocean.

Mayer Parry Recycling
The Mayer Parry Recycling group of companies, the "mother" of MIT, was formed in 1990 when several existing recycling companies merged. The most important partners were the Co-Steel Sheerness Company, which had its own scrap operations for buying feed for its steelworks, the Parry Metals Group, which was processing scrap and non-ferrous metals at seven locations, and a company called Mayer Newman. Co-Steel entered the scrap market mainly for reasons of investment.
Mayer Parry Recycling clearly intends to be more than just one of the largest metals recycling companies in the world with 21 sites, an output of 1.75 million tonnes of scrap per annum and a total turnover of US$ 300 million. Over the last decade, it has developed its own technologies in such areas as flotation systems and heavy media metals separation, and a patented wet shredding downstream system. Mayer Parry also has its own in-house environmental consultancy that also takes assignments from other companies, and, since last year, Mayer Information Technology..

Weighbridge system - backbone of the Materials Manager
The Materials Manager software package basically consists of two pieces - a weighbridge system (scale system, as the Americans would call it) and a business management system. The weighbridge system is the backbone of the system, as most of the data is acquired by weighing. Because it has to be 100% reliable, the weighbridge system has its own stand alone set up, so it can operate at all times, independent of a backing server or failures in communications or telephone lines. The one-screen system, keyboard based, and easy-to-use system can handle multiple grades and multiple, separate weighings, which is more accurate. The system also separates the inventory grades (stock grades) to what Mayer Parry classifies as bought grade, allowing an operator to do an instant re-grade on the weighing bridge.
The system also keeps track of the reasons why adjustments, corrections and deductions have been made on incoming loads - for instance for dirt content and whether this was water or concrete, and makes cross adjustments, e.g. for tyres on a car body - so to later analyze what kind of material is coming in from suppliers. Basically, the system tracks as many things as possible - always looking for irregularities - as they physically occur, and stores the data for analysis at a later stage. The weighbridge system stores the data locally in its own database, but they can can be read directly into the Materials Manager database, making the decentralized info centrally available. Another element is an on-line and live "polling system". When there is a price change across the markets, one can see how that affects the prices right away and adjust prices and inform suppliers and customers at the earliest stage.

Fraud tracking
Because the system is logging everything that is weighed, it can check for any irregularities that take place. For instance: if one lorry is weighed in, and the next, almost identical lorry weighs much more or less, the system shows it. But the fraud tracking function also allows to pick out the legitimate reason why something occurs, pull the coincidences out and leave the unusual ones.
'In setting it up, we tried to fraud the system ourselves and fine-tune the system accordingly. It worked - we have actually found frauds within our company that way,' Horan confirms. 'This fraud tracking function in our system is unique. No-one of our competitors offers this feature.'
Horan denies that this part of the Materials manager has led to a "Big Brother syndrome" among the people working for Mayer Parry Recycling. 'On the contrary, the system is a protection for the operators because everything must be recorded into the system.

Production Management
This allows keeping track of what a processor's infeed and output. It is able to identify multiple processes at a site. For instance, the system can identify the intake of materials and subsequently identify the grades that are separated or produced from it. It also shows on a daily basis the delay and run time information - working hours, plant downtime, no-scrap hours, delay hours, etc. For monitoring processes, a process-configuration has been added to the system, making it possible, for instance for shredders, to know what the yield roughly is, or keeping track of the input-output availability. An integrated production module allows for obtaining inventory/production figures. Through a batch control option, its is possible to analyse each batch by its particular number. This makes it possible, for instance, to detect how much, and which metals were separated from a batch of non-ferrous metals, how much dirt there was, etc. Thus, one can end up paying a supplier only for the metallic content of his material.

Materials Manager
When asked to describe the Material Manager in a few key words, Robert Horan says: 'Pro-active, multiple, instant, and accurate. It is very multiple in sites, currency, measures, users, etc.
For instance, the system is able to sub-categorize each grade of material into a grade-group such as ferrous, non-ferrous, plastics, and heavy media, which can be viewed and analyzed through the purchase or inventory screen.'
Basically, the Materials manager is a business tool to manage and control every aspect of the recycling process, from purchases, prices, and sales, to production, stock and billing.

The Materials Manager contains the following modules:

• Purchasing
• Inventory management
• Supplier and customer tracking
• Production management (including batch processing)
• Security system
• Auditing
• Fraud tracking

Re-produced with permission from Recycling International Magazine