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Mergers and acquisitions, in particular, change the landscape of Hauler. They also affect technology providers.
Michael Winton is president of North America at AMCS, a large Ireland-based cloud and software platform provider serving waste and recycling customers. Consolidation between carriers can mean extending the same software systems to acquired assets. And smaller companies that embrace technology can make for stronger acquisition targets, Winton said in an interview with West Dive.
M&A was also important in the technology sector. “The technology position probably mirrors the operator position in terms of M&A,” Winton said. “The most important type of acquisition for us at this time is where we acquire a complement to our solutions footprint that will help us extend the services and business benefits we provide to our existing customer base.”
Winton touted more than a dozen acquisitions during his tenure at AMCS, including US-based Dose Systems, a deal announced last November that allowed AMCS to grow in fleet maintenance management.
Today, 60% of revenue comes from existing customers and 40% from new ones. Winton said the company will continue to consider how AI applications can help in routing, pricing and other areas in the future.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Dirty Dive Digitization of various aspects of waste businesses is becoming common. Do you all see a lot of remaining ‘low-hanging fruit’ – US scrap operations that may still be using some old technology – or is AMCS more focused on building the range of equipment used by existing customers?
Michael Winton
License granted by AMCS.
Winton: When you think about mobile technologies or in-cab mobility – I think mobile applications were introduced to the industry six, eight or more years ago – we find that there are operators who still have a printed roadmap. So I think there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit.
In the waste and recycling industry, compared to other industries (financial services, and certainly other consumer markets) … there are still very few operators who conduct real business transactions with their customers digitally. So I think there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit in the automation industry.
Among AMCS’s offerings, what is currently driving the most growth in the North American waste and recycling market?
I don’t think we’ll see a certain episode. We operate at the top and bottom of the market as it can be divided by operator size.
We see a lot of traction in the Tier 1 market, making a lot of acquisitions in the North American market. But at the same time, [down market]there continues to be more. [spending] On technology, these operators are looking for ways to differentiate themselves in their regional markets. And I think horizontally across our solutions footprint, we see this drive to engage customers digitally. That’s a key theme, whether that’s engaging customers digitally in servicing existing customers – thus reducing service costs – or actually acquiring new customers and driving revenue growth online. That’s a huge growth area.
What we are seeing is very widespread. [is the] The emergence of a circular economy. So many garbage operators start to see [waste streams as resource streams]. Officially, WM, in both their rebranding and [their investment dollars] They are driving to work as a power producer. We have customers who are taking landscape and yard waste into the waste stream, recycling it into compost, and selling it as consumer compost and compost.
Similarly, manufacturing customers are moving down the recycling stream to capture materials that go into their manufacturing operations – so whether it’s steel manufacturers moving further into metal casting and stockpiling, or paper manufacturers moving further down the value chain. Recycled fiber for feed to their mills – I think [this circular economy theme] It’s probably another key driver that we see around the business.
You mentioned M&A in the industry. How will all the ongoing M&A affect AMCS’s footprint?
I think it affects the whole market a lot.
I have been at AMCS for six years managing our North American business. One of the things that M&A has done is bring more professional money into the industry, and every successive year there is more professional money in the industry – so more private investors and more professional investors. And I think that’s driven by more professional management and a focus on professionally managed businesses, and for us that often means investing in technology. So we see M&A activity and the flow of professional investors into the market as a technology partner to keep us healthy.
How do you all see the partnership with other technology providers? Are there things AMCS can do when there are other vendors involved with Hauler to adapt technologies or improve the overall experience?
We see an opportunity to partner. If you think about where we are located, it is like a central hub and we are located in the main operations of most of our customers. During those milestones, we’re helping our customers make better use of data.
[As a software company]We have invested heavily in having an open architecture. Three and a half years ago, we thought it would be very important for us to be more open and easier to integrate with other technologies. And one of the new innovations we introduced this year is a solution called Vision AI, which uses artificial intelligence to help our customers reduce pollution and recycling in the waste stream. [into a truck].
There are two key players in that solution: one is the device that captures the image, whether it’s stills or video, and two is sophisticated software that interprets the image. So we shared it with different device vendors who are hosting the image. We saw that a number of our customers were standardizing on their trucks in their dealings with different vendors and it was something we had to open up to. And in that regard, the collection of that information was not something we focused on. We focused on our usage to maximize the value of the data those devices were capturing.
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