The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how sensitive construction supply chains can be to disruptions in logistics and in-person verification or work. The paralysis that followed affected multiple parts of the supply chain, seemingly infecting one part and then the next. As the German Supply Chain Act seeks to spur firms to consider measures that strengthen their supply chain while making it more transparent and humane, material passports (a form of digital product passport more applicable for the construction industry) may be one sort of immunisation against the worst of supply chain disruptions now and in the future.
What kinds of problems does a supply chain face when confronted with the pandemic? Consider the case of a Singapore-based façade specialist that had to manage a major airport project in the Philippines when travel restrictions were at their highest. With planning engineers in Singapore, technical staff on-site in the Philippines, and glass manufacturers in China, the specialist’s supply chain for this project was already stretched. COVID-19 exacerbated the situation since the specialist’s staff could not visit and supervise progress on the site. This exposed the specialist to the risks of inefficient supply chain management.
Progress reporting could not easily be done using traditional methods of manual consolidation and asynchronous reporting since the stakeholders were so distributed geographically and functionally. Time and effort were often wasted to create overlapping reports that became outdated almost as soon as they were prepared.
Read this free case study on how the specialist contractor mentioned here used Geometrid to overcome its supply chain challenges across time and space in COVID-19
Material passports offer a solution to these supply chain challenges and more.
Material passports would be digital product passports issued for raw materials or other basic materials used in a value-added step as part of the construction process. Such materials include the cement and sand used in concrete (and the concrete itself after accounting for other admixtures), the steel used in rebar, caulks and adhesives, coatings and finishes, and so on. It also leads to greater circularity, especially for the reuse of raw materials and scraps salvaged from a building when it’s decommissioned and demolished. Having registers of materials (with many material passports across projects) will allow the industry to better allocate resources without extracting new ones from nature.
Material passports could be embedded into element passports or simply stand alone. These would allow lower-tier suppliers to automate and make more economical the process of providing information on construction materials so that all stakeholders have a better understanding of all of the different materials (and their sustainability profiles) used in the building. This unlocks a tremendous number of opportunities to analyse buildings for facilities management purposes: preventative maintenance based on the composition of the air-exposed elements, for example.
With certifiers, stakeholders, and the passports themselves easily integrated into the stages and APIs that Geometrid can offer, you can give your supply chain a booster shot against disruptions with Geometrid today—with minimal hardware and training and maximum benefit and speed in implementation. Get in touch to learn more!
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