Bringing supply chain decarbonization full circle for the construction industry
Amid rising public awareness, more stringent regulations, and investor pressure, construction companies increasingly see environmental sustainability as a business imperative and are turning to technology solutions to help them deliver projects in line with their—and their customers’—sustainability requirements.
One leader in the sustainability space, Circulor specializes in supply chain traceability and carbon emissions tracking. Circulor offers the most mature and proven solution available, to give companies, including those in the construction sector, full visibility and a deep understanding of their supply chains, as well as the opportunities presented by decarbonization.
Jointly helping construction companies consider how to achieve this was crucial to Circulor, and an innovation partnership with Oracle was a natural progression for the UK-based technology company.
Circulor, a 2021 winner of the Oracle Sustainability Awards, is one of the technology partners featured at the UK Oracle Industry Lab. The Circulor platform integrates with Oracle Primavera Unifier and is hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
“We're at the forefront of innovation in our space, so it's great to be working with Oracle and Oracle's construction customers to drive not just the conversation, but real movement and change. We can make real, tangible progress through both our solution and Oracle's solution,” says Delia Zanatta, Vice President – Customer, at Circulor. “We're both innovative and tried and tested.”
Decarbonizing supply chains to limit global warming
A 2021 analysis by the World Economic Forum states that over 50% of global CO2 emissions are concentrated in the supply chains of just eight industries—one of which is construction. Decarbonizing these supply chains is seen as a key factor to fight climate change and meet Paris Agreement goals to curb climate change.
An enterprise software solution, Circulor helps construction companies to track, analyze, and manage their supply chains, working with key industry players for the past five years at scale. As the leader in supply chain traceability for electric vehicle batteries in the automotive sector, Circulor’s move into construction was a natural fit, Zanatta says. Because Circulor tracks materials through complex supply chains, there are similarities cutting across multiple industries including automotive and construction.
“If you think about traceability through a supply chain, we're creating a digital twin, like a digital mirror image of what's actually physically happening on the ground,” Zanatta says. “And we're capturing the various industrial processes and transformations of materials at each step through the supply chain.”
Effective carbon emissions tracking
To help adhere to ethical sourcing standards, Circulor’s technology traces components back to the raw materials, assigns an identity to those materials, and follows them through the supply chain, including through to responsible and sustainable demolition and deconstruction. By creating a digital thread, Circulor can also capture and overlay additional pieces of information including carbon emissions and other environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data.
Circulor’s carbon emissions tracking solution captures and then dynamically aggregates carbon emissions at each step through the supply chain. A combination of technologies provides Circulor’s customers, whichever sector they are in, with proof of compliance and materials used.
Construction customers can, for example, see the carbon that's been created by the construction company itself, as well as the carbon inherited from suppliers, so they can confidently make better-informed decisions and choices about where and how to decarbonize.
Meeting the needs of owners and builders
Sustainable business practices for the construction industry are a mainstream issue now, driven by factors including investor and consumer behavior as well as ambitious targets established by regional, national, and global agencies. This applies to both owners and construction companies, and Circulor works to help both attain their sustainability goals.
How Circulor helps Owners and Contractors
Circulor helps owners reduce risk, increase resilience, and build competitive advantage by supporting regulatory compliance like reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; mandatory disclosure of emissions; increased energy efficiency; proof of provenance of certain materials; recycled content; and material recovery requirements.
“We can help them prepare for new regulations and prove delivery on ESG commitments,” Zanatta says. “And we help construction contractors, in turn, to provide the evidence their customers need, in order to achieve this.”
According to Geoff Roberts, director of industry and innovation for Oracle Construction and Engineering, “Oracle Primavera Unifier together with Circulor allows customers to combine the project and asset management capabilities of Unifier and the CO2/GHG tracking capabilities of the Circulor platform to calculate total estimated CO2 impact of a project and monitor actual impact versus estimates during the project lifecycle. The ability to track CO2/GHG metrics over the life of the project will provide the tools to take into account sustainability when evaluating change, in addition to scope, schedule, and cost.”
As the construction sector strives to meet its green goals, decarbonization is something that forward-thinking construction companies can use as a differentiator as they get their heads around solving ESG by integrating solutions from Circulor and Oracle.
“Our integration with Oracle Primavera Unifier puts our supply chain traceability and carbon emissions tracking capability at the heart of Oracle's already great capital program management solution,” Zanatta says. “Construction companies can take advantage of that and seize that opportunity.”
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