Podcast: “An app for the forgetful business – Ben Redwood, Mutu” (edited excerpt)
Listen to the full episode here.
Ross:
“Ever gone looking for the teabags, not found them, bought some more, and then discovered you had teabags all along, buried in the back of the cupboard? A New Zealand start-up says businesses do the same thing.
They buy things, forget they have them, and then buy new things. The result – wasted resources, up to five million tonnes of them annually. The company is Mutu and it has a solution – a resource-sharing app that makes it easy for organisations to list and discover resources.
Mutu's CEO is Ben Redwood, and he's with us in the studio today. Ben, welcome to This Climate Business. Let's start with the problem. Are businesses really that forgetful, and what does it cost them?”
Ben:
“Well, Kia ora, Ross, great to be here. Research shows that about 80% of what gets put into storage eventually ends up in landfill.
So, there's a huge problem around visibility of things that are put away. And then, as you said with your teabag example, as a result, you go and buy things because you can't find where they are. You don't know where you've put them.
And when you're talking about big multi-site organisations that are spread over a large geographical area, this is going to equate to millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste.”
Ross:
“That sounds kind of counterintuitive because businesses are in business to make money, and it sounds like they're wasting spectacular amounts of it. Why are they wasting so much?”
Ben:
“We won't go down the deep rabbit hole of procurement, and particularly procurement in New Zealand. But for us, it's just a visibility piece. So, within these organisations, they’re often very siloed, often teams don't know what other teams are doing.
And as a result, there's just constant procuring of things that already exist and discarding of things that potentially have value for other team members.”
Ross:
“And are there particular industries that are most vulnerable to this?”
Ben:
“All of them, from what we've seen peeking behind the curtain. I mean, healthcare is a really good example. Construction's a big example.
A lot of this happens in the education sector, particularly within universities and large schools. I haven't come across an industry that's safe from this.”
The big difference with Mutu is we just work internally with businesses where this is big enough of a problem.
At Mutu, we have the three R's of Mutu. The first R is ‘reveal’. So essentially, using your phone, anytime you come across something that's got reuse potential, if you want to document what's in your storage facilities or yards, you can just create a digital inventory of all of these assets straight on Mutu. Reveal what you have.
The second R of Mutu is ‘reuse’. And we make it really, really easy for anyone at any point to open their phone and see what exists across the business before they make a procurement decision. And so if I need, let's say, some headphones for what I'm working on, I can open up Mutu, type in headphones, and I'll see everything that's got a headphone tag, and I can send a claim request to the person who's responsible for those items that I want them.
The final R of Mutu is ‘report’, and that's the part that most of our customers are actually interested in.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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