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Telefónica Reuses Over 19 Million Routers and STBs Using Blockchain Technology
Telefónica is making progress towards its goal of becoming a Zero Waste company by 2030, promoting the refurbishment of equipment at the customer’s premises (CPE) and facilitating its reconditioning for reuse, thus preventing waste generation.
To promote the circular economy, the company has developed the VICKY platform, which uses blockchain to improve traceability, monitoring and control along the entire value chain of modems, routers and TV decoders.
Since its implementation five years ago, Telefónica has reused more than 19 million routers and decoders across its operations. In 2023, the company achieved a collection rate of 88% of all equipment, moving closer to its goal of 90% by 2024.
This system significantly improves collection rates and reconditioning processes, thus extending the life of equipment. The solution has been recognized for its innovation (Gartner, Forbes) in promoting a more efficient, faster, simpler and more sustainable supply chain.
Today’s supply chains are increasingly global, complex, and involve cross-border logistics. This creates challenges such as long lead times due to market shortages of electronic components or inefficiencies in device sourcing.
In this context, collaboration becomes essential to address these challenges, since Telefónica’s activities related to electronic equipment, such as modems and decoders, involve more than 100 companies on three continents.
VICKY enables Telefónica Group to address these challenges by ensuring the traceability of equipment through the complete automation of the logistics process and helps suppliers achieve greater efficiency through digitalization.
As a result, the system optimizes purchasing, avoids delays and facilitates access to product information, such as production location, critical components and information relevant to maintenance processes or equipment refurbishment.
Extending the useful life of equipment avoids emissions, waste and resource consumption associated with the manufacture of new equipment. When equipment cannot be reused, the best option is to recycle it, since each piece contains materials such as gold or copper that can be used in new products. Telefónica ensures their correct recycling treatment through another platform.
Telefónica integrates the circular economy into its processes to optimize resource consumption and promotes design with environmental criteria, reuse and recycling to minimize its impact and encourage the reincorporation of materials into the production cycle. Circularity helps avoid indirect carbon emissions associated with the extraction of new materials for the production of new equipment, contributing to the achievement of net zero emissions by 2040
Fernando Valero, Global Director of Supply Chain and Procurement Transformation at Telefónica
We strongly believe that much of the innovation we will see in the near future will focus on process transformation, where new technologies such as blockchain, big data and the Internet of Things will be key factors in helping to decarbonize operations while generating environmental benefits.