Circulor
Circulor is a supply chain traceability solution with a particular focus on traceability for battery minerals and other materials that make the clean energy transition possible.
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50 to Know / 50 to Watch / Future 5 / Hall of Fame
In Their Own Words: Circulor
Our enterprise software solution helps businesses analyze, track and manage their supply chains, creating data-driven decision-making for companies in their progress toward more responsible and sustainable sourcing.
We track the flow of physical materials as they change chemical and physical state from raw to final product with traceability enabled at every production step to create a reliable digital chain of custody. We’re also able to attribute ESG and compliance data to the flow of materials, including embedded carbon emissions.
Circulor offers a full lifecycle Battery Passport, which enables customers to demonstrate the. embedded carbon footprint, responsible sourcing, recycled content, and state of health performance of batteries to meet regulatory requirements like the EU Battery Regulation.
Circulor’s traceability technology can be applied to any material, product, and supply chain.
Since our establishment in 2017 our primary focus has been on battery minerals traceability given their high human and environmental impact, as well as their infinite potential for recycling. We work with companies operating across the battery value chain, including OEMs—such as Volvo Cars, Polestar, Volkswagen, Daimler, and BMW—as well as midstream producers, miners, and recyclers.
We have the largest battery traceability network on the market with over 145 customer facilities connected and actively contributing traceability and sustainability data to our platform. Our extensive network makes implementation for our new customers especially efficient and straightforward.
Our View
What it Does
Circulor is a young and ascending supply chain visibility vendor. It tracks and traces minerals starting at the mine and continuing to the OEM using reporting data and statistical process-control methodology. Circulor bills itself as “TAAS” (traceability-as-a-service) for material provenance, creating a “digital twin” of your product.
Most supply chain visibility solutions track top-down starting at OEM moving upstream, often relying on lifecycle assessment data. Circulor, however, starts at the raw material providers and traces material flow downstream, watching the material change through the supply chain as value is added. Circulor is a rule-based system wherein the customer defines expected yields and outcomes such as location, elapsed time, mass balance calculations, quality assurance, responsible sourcing standards and energy use. Circulor monitors the reporting on outcomes at each step, taking a statistical process-control approach to send alerts when signals exceed control boundaries.
Why We Chose It
The main factor in Circulor’s election to the Future 5 for 2021 is that its method of tackling CO2 emissions is truly innovative. Circulor is unique in that it goes down to the material transformation level. This is fundamentally different from simply reporting emissions estimates on a form, as Circulor’s solution actually calculates it bottoms-up and tracks the whole material lifecycle on blockchain.
In addition to the provider’s uniqueness, it is also very precise — by relying on an understanding of both the bill of materials and the processes being used, its findings are more accurate than a provider that solely reports emissions estimates. Further, Circulor’s tracing methodology makes it much easier to trace downstream.
Finally, Circulor has powerful customers and industry strategic advisors. Its customers are not just buyers, but also other supply chain participants. We believe that Circulor’s tracing methodology is the future of supply chain traceability and ESG as a whole — if we want to make meaningful changes globally with respect to climate change, we have to go deeper. Circulor is an excellent example of an ESG vendor that does exactly this, and it is thus a very strong choice for our 2021 Future 5.
Any threats or challenges ahead?
At the same time, Circulor’s greatest strengths could also be its biggest blockers. The intricate, material-level tracking that the vendor offers is, in our view, one of the most valuable approaches to emissions reductions, yet many businesses are not thinking on this level. Instead, buying organizations are approaching CO2 emissions reduction from a supplier level, opting for a top-down, program-wide approach. Vendors that are gathering estimate data in approaches such as this, like EcoVadis or Greenstone, provide an easier — if less comprehensive — answer to a burning question, which makes for a difficult competitive position. Ultimately the ability of Circulor to scale its technology may depend on how it expands the value prop of the platform to more areas and more types of materials, and how quickly it can achieve this.
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