Clean Harbors replaces legacy systems with Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications
Oracle Fusion Apps help the waste services firm accelerate collections, reduce costs and employee turnover, and integrate acquired companies faster.
United States | Environmental Services
“The Oracle Fusion platform we have is scalable and can really grow with us, and that was a big part of our decision about how we move the business forward. And when you look at the investment that Oracle is making in AI, clearly, we know we made a good decision.”
Clean Harbors is a leading provider of environmental and hazardous waste management services in North America, with 750 facilities and a fleet of more than 20,000 vehicles. As the company expanded, its legacy financial and HR tools were slowing progress: collections lagged behind industry benchmarks, cash applications were error prone, and the cost of maintaining multiple software add-ons soared. Clean Harbors turned to Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to establish unified processes under a single platform. With Oracle’s financial and HR applications, Clean Harbors accelerated accounts receivable by 5%, reduced unapplied cash by up to 70%, decreased employee turnover by 10%, and achieved annual cost savings of more than $1 million, all while laying the groundwork for future AI projects.
Why Clean Harbors chose Oracle
Clean Harbors needed a scalable cloud platform to unify its finance, HR, and sales processes as its business expanded, partly through acquisitions, and the company outgrew its legacy systems. After evaluating multiple vendors, the company chose Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), and the incentive compensation capabilities in Oracle Sales Performance Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM). Clean Harbors chose Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications because they’re part of an integrated suite and for their AI-powered analytics capabilities.
Clean Harbors valued the ability to consolidate financial, workforce, and operational data to support rapid decision-making. Standardizing on one suite of cloud applications also makes it easier to onboard acquired companies, comply with regulations, and get the latest data security updates. Clean Harbors’ IT team appreciated the ease of data and application integration, via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and the ability to deploy Oracle’s AI agents for financial closes, hiring, and onboarding.
“The proliferation of AI agents that Oracle is releasing is something that we had no idea was going to happen, and we’re excited to learn more about.”
—Alan McKim, Founder, Executive Chairman, and Chief Technology Officer, Clean Harbors
Results
Moving to Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications helped Clean Harbors eliminate more than $1 million in annual software license and IT maintenance expenses as it replaced multiple standalone and custom systems, as well as costly third-party add-ons, with Oracle’s integrated modules. The unified platform also helps the company with its compliance efforts and simplifies IT management.
On the finance side, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM helped the company reduce outstanding collections by about 5%, boosting cash flow by 30% and reducing unapplied cash by up to 70% in the first year. Teams now focus on higher-value accounts and exceptions as automated payment collections and reminders handle routine outreach, improving both financial performance and employee morale.
On the HR side, 25,000 Clean Harbors employees can access Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM applications, including ones for recruiting and onboarding. The company says the applications have helped it reduce voluntary turnover by 10% and accelerate hiring for critical roles. Clean Harbors is using an AI feature in the Oracle Recruiting module called Suggested Candidates to help identify best-fit job candidates from the roughly 8,000 resumes it receives each week.
With the company’s legacy application, significant manual effort and integrations were required across financial, payroll, and other HR systems to compile accurate incentive figures for its field salesforce. Clean Harbors is in the process of transitioning to the incentive compensation module in Oracle Sales Performance Management, part of the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) suite of applications, for its sales incentive program. Clean Harbors’ goal is to automate and improve that process to gain a complete view of workforce and incentive compensation.
Clean Harbors is implementing Oracle Fusion AI Data Platform, formerly known as Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence, to analyze its hundreds of terabytes of finance, operational, and other data to help optimize business performance for its branches and complex logistics network. The company is also exploring using Oracle AI agents to automate and improve its employee hiring and onboarding, financial period close, cost accounting, procurement, and other processes, as well as natural language generative AI features to query enterprise data.
About the customer
Clean Harbors, based in Norwell, Massachusetts, provides waste disposal, environmental remediation, and industrial cleaning services across the US and Canada.