Oracle@Oracle—Sustainability

Our Oracle@Oracle story illustrates the power of transformative sustainable practices

Our move to the cloud has enabled us to reimagine every facet of our business—including sustainability. Our cloud transformation has led us to a business model that’s better for both the environment and our bottom line. We improved efficiency, eliminated waste, and recovered value, all while reducing our emissions and environmental impact. Let us put the sustainability learnings and practices we developed during our transformation to work for you.

Products: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Analytics Cloud

Assessing our reality and redefining the future

Oracle periodically conducts a materiality assessment to identify and understand where we should focus our efforts. This process helps us optimize the economic, environmental, and social performance required for long-term business success while enabling us to communicate Oracle’s value contribution and the positive impact we make in the communities in which we operate. We use this information to steer data-driven business decisions, rationalize our supplier base, reduce costs, and mitigate the risks in our sourcing strategies.

Our move to Oracle Cloud reduced our required computing hardware by 50%. Cloud computing is typically 60% to 70% more efficient than on-premises data centers, and we reuse or recycle more than 99% of our retired equipment.

Oracle Cloud technology has been critical in establishing and managing our environmental impact—both in terms of our own operational footprint as well as that of our supply chain—and has enabled us to set key goals, including becoming net zero by 2050, increasing supplier engagement, and reducing waste and water use. To measure our progress, we rely on Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Analytics Cloud to provide timely and actionable data to drive environmental performance improvements.

Consolidating our data and systems on Oracle Cloud gives us invaluable insights into our supplier’s environmental performance as well as a means to use a compliant approach for quantifying spend-based supply chain greenhouse gas emissions.

Sam Mitchell Global Sustainability Director, Oracle

Our work in the cloud also reflects our long-standing view that to effectively build a more sustainable future, we need to embed sustainable thinking into our organization’s day-to-day business processes and the technology we use to support them. As we like to say, “At Oracle, sustainability is everyone’s business.”

Enabling sustainability with technology

In our ongoing quest to operationalize sustainability, we use Oracle Cloud SCM to enhance supplier engagement, understand the impact of our supply chain, improve our planning processes, and optimize our hardware distribution and service parts management. We also leverage technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously improve our performance in the built environment.

As a result, over the last five years, we have driven improvements in energy efficiency, potable water use, waste to landfill intensity, and absolute emissions—improvements that are also associated with millions of dollars in savings.

The Oracle Cloud IoT solutions empower real estate facilities professionals to embrace innovation, adapt to change, and use a data-driven approach to operations, space design and a workplace experience that’s sustainable.

Francisco Ruiz Infrastructure Strategist and Director of IoT, Global Engineering Center, Real Estate and Facilities, Oracle

As companies look to sustainability as a means of managing risk, avoiding costs, and building a brand, we present a model of how operational efficiency—from product development to employee engagement—can help them transform their organizations to operate more sustainably.

Using Oracle Technology to track our Sustainability progress

In addition to leveraging Oracle’s IoT and AI capabilities to weave sustainability into our Real Estate and Facilities (RE&F) operations, we have also leveraged a unique platform to monitor our progress toward our sustainability goals. This tool, titled Environmental Accounting Sustainability Reporting, is a platform-as-a-service application designed to help RE&F meet global demand for internal and external sustainability reporting. The platform marries utility invoices and building information from existing RE&F applications to perform calculations that populate a dashboard that displays greenhouse gas emissions, energy, water and waste transactions, and normalized usage via revealing tables and graphs. Having this key data in an accessible platform increases our visibility, enabling us to make decisions that keep us on track to meet our sustainability targets.

Sourcing sustainably

Like many large organizations, our supply chain has a significant impact both on our bottom line and the planet. Our relationships with our suppliers, supported by Oracle Cloud SCM applications, are critical in aligning us all with our sustainability goals.

In our direct supply chain, we work closely with suppliers to improve their sustainability performance, drive logistics optimization, and improve planning. In some categories, such as logistics, we have seen more than a 40% reduction in emissions over the last five years. Overall, in our direct supply chain, 72% of our key suppliers now have an emissions reduction target.

In our indirect supply chain, we have more than 30,000 suppliers and use spend data to focus our engagement. Currently 63% of our key suppliers have an emissions reduction target. For some categories we also use analytics to dive more deeply into our activities in collaboration with our business partners.

Engaging on sustainability with our key suppliers not only helps us manage our supply chain impacts, but it also helps us manage risk, reduce cost, and promote innovation.

Results

Oracle has achieved a significant return on investment—including saving millions of dollars in operational costs—and improved sustainability performance by

• Reusing or recycling more than 99% of decommissioned hardware
• Achieving a greater than 40% reduction in logistics emissions from a 2015 baseline
• Aligning with suppliers to meet our sustainability goals—more than 60% of both our indirect and direct suppliers have emissions reduction targets
• Decreasing energy consumption as a result of dramatic computing efficiency gains
• Decreasing resource consumption by leveraging the elasticity of the cloud to rapidly deploy computing resources only as and when they’re needed
• Reducing absolute emissions in our operations
• Reducing waste to landfill and potable water usage in our facilities

For more information, visit oracle.com/sustainability.