“Our company has its own ESG (environment, social and governance) lens, but what we are in effect doing is enabling producers of containers to facilitate their own ESG objectives,” says Tim Reid, IT Director at CES.

“We’re helping them to take responsibility for what they produce which is a great purpose.”

ESG has no legacy systems

Ultimately, CES is providing industry players with a platform to resolve their own ESG issues, allowing hundreds of parties and industries to access the CES infrastructure - connecting the circular economy.

Underpinning all of this is Oracle infrastructure.

Blayney says the company is unique in that, not only is the concept so new it has few if any rivals, it also had the advantage of no on-premise legacy systems to contend with. What it wanted was a platform that was scalable and easy to maintain.

After evaluating several major cloud service providers, CES chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.

The decision was based on Oracle’s integrated solutions from Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, which CES saw as the market-leading SaaS ERP system, and OCI with Oracle Autonomous Database, which eliminates complex database administration.

This has freed CES up to do what it does best; engage with stakeholders and innovate.

For John Leonard, vice president, ERP & HCM SaaS applications at Oracle Australia, the increasing levels of ESG compliance are driving more businesses to seek out the kind of technological infrastructure that Oracle supplies.

“ESG is playing an increasingly important role in purchasing decisions for consumers and businesses. In today’s world, if you sell to a company you not only need to share your ESG plan, but how you are tracking and measuring it,” Leonard says. “What are you doing regarding sourcing? How are your products made? How are they shipped?

In fact, 91 per cent of Australians believe society has not made enough progress on sustainability and social efforts, according to Oracle’s just-released “No Planet B” research, carried out in partnership with Savanta Research and CIO adviser Pamela Rucker.

In addition, if organisations can clearly demonstrate the progress they’re making on environmental and social issues, the majority of those surveyed said they would be more willing to pay a premium for their products and services (77 per cent); work for them (76 per cent); and invest in them (74 per cent).

“There’s now an increasing level of compliance and complexity with these new ESG requirements and people are coming to Oracle because they’re anticipating that regulation and compliance is only going to increase.”

Forecasting dodged shutdown

Oracle infrastructure is not only helping new players such as CES connect the circular economy in Australia, but it’s also helping established giants such as Unilever and restaurant group Chipotle action their sustainability promises as well.

“ESG doesn’t use the word efficiency but that’s one of its most important underpinnings,” he says. “Unilever, by using Oracle, drove 29 million fewer kilometres and dropped their CO2 emissions by 9 per cent in the US.”

Chipotle, meanwhile, gained a clearer view across its financial systems with Oracle, leading to improved demand forecasting and inventory control. When COVID hit, it accurately forecast a 30 per cent drop in inventory, allowing it to continue at reduced capacity and thereby avoiding a total shutdown; a pleasant surprise for its suppliers.

Rochester, New York-based food and beverage producer LiDestri managed to reduce food waste by $US2 million by using Oracle applications.

“That’s $US2 million worth of food that didn’t go into the bin, allowing them to reduce their inventory,” he says. “So the feedback has been very, very positive and continues what we’ve been doing for years, which is moving people from their own disparate, on-premise systems often using their own hardware and putting them in our cloud.”

For CES, however, one of the key advantage of an Oracle system is its scalability.

“What’s really exciting about Oracle is that our growth ambitions today are to support and cover Australia, but who knows what the future holds,” says Blayney. “Oracle has that global scale that can allow us to operate in many markets.”