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In 2022, metals and mining services company Phoenix Global filed for bankruptcy. It was bought by a PE fund, which brought in experts like Jeff Suellentrop, previously the CITO of Majestic Steel, to turn it around. Suellentrop and his team implemented new systems for gathering and managing data, which they integrated across Phoenix Global’s 23 worldwide locations. They also adopted Motive, an AI platform designed for logistics companies, to help increase safety and provide the company with real-time data around its vehicles and other assets.
The technology has more than paid for itself, Suellentrop, now Phoenix Global’s CITO, told CFO Brew. It’s also contributed to the company’s financial solvency: Phoenix Global emerged from bankruptcy in June 2023, and it’s “beat [its] numbers every single month since,” he noted.
AI can reap benefits—if it’s deployed correctly and for the right reasons, Suellentrop said. He shared advice for how CITOs and CFOs can work together to maximize its ROI.
The company: Phoenix Global provides ancillary services to the metals and mining industry, such as equipment rental, cleaning and disposal of byproducts, transporting raw and finished materials, managing inventory, and grading and dampening roads. It employs around 2,000 people in locations in North and South America, the EU, and Africa, and owns thousands of assets, most in the form of dump trucks, loaders, and other pieces of heavy off-road equipment.
Until very recently, Phoenix Global relied heavily on paper, Suellentrop said. Equipment operators would complete pre- and post-shift inspection reports on paper. Admins would need to manually input information from paper rental forms into the company’s system. (“It would take days and weeks,” Suellentrop said.) The company was also taking 30–45 days to close its books, and he wanted to “get that as close to real-time as possible,” he said.
Suellentrop and his team implemented SAP’s S4/HANA cloud to standardize processes across Phoenix Global’s 23 sites. They also installed Motive’s cameras on Phoenix’s vehicles and equipment. The cameras can detect unsafe driver behavior, such as drowsiness or using cell phones while driving. They sync with Motive’s app, installed on tablets in each vehicle, and coach operators on their driving. The cameras can also provide data on how often vehicles and equipment are used, which can help with capacity planning.
The Motive platform also integrates with Phoenix Global’s systems to help it go paperless. Drivers can now submit work orders online, for instance, and can send photos of equipment failures to maintenance directly from their tablets. Operations can use Motive’s algorithms to determine how many vehicles might be needed for a given task.
The ROI: The ROI of the new technology is “in the millions of dollars,” Suellentrop said, and is in the “low double digits” across metrics running “from safety to equipment utilization, to optimization and inventory reduction.”
Safety is the standout. The company saw “over a 40% improvement in incidents” after the cameras were installed, Suellentrop said. “The ROI is pretty staggering” when you compare the cost of the system to the cost of avoiding one significant incident, he added.
AI isn’t “pixie dust”: The key to successful technology implementation, Suellentrop believes, is identifying the outcomes you want to achieve and then finding the technology that can deliver on them. Too many technologists, he said, “lead with technology first and then find a home for it.” That’s especially true, Suellentrop said, of trendy tech like AI: People sometimes think of it as a kind of magical “pixie dust” that they can sprinkle on a problem to solve it. A better approach, he thinks, is for CITOs to talk to finance about the business challenges they face and then find tech that can “force multiply the delivery of an outcome or removal of a problem.”
Finance leaders should also be willing to “iterate” with new technology, Suellentrop said. Sometimes, he said, leaders look for one-time deliverables when it’s better to expect to proceed in stages. “Iterate through the journey,” is his advice. “Fail fast, win fast, and iterate, because perfect is evolving every day.”
Say it with stats: Leaders can also use statistics to their advantage during the change management process. One hurdle Suellentrop faced early on during Phoenix’s tech transformation was drivers’ resistance to the new technology. The tablets and AI coaching made them feel a bit like Big Brother was peering over their shoulders, he said. When he let drivers know that the cameras could exonerate a driver 74% of the time in an accident, they started to see that the system was keeping them safer and reducing their liability. In time they viewed it as an “asset,” he said, and it’s become “second nature to people now.”