Building components don't circulate without data – Reround launches a new inventory platform

Reuse needs reliable product data

Usable building components still go to waste in construction, even though demand for reusing them is growing. One of the challenges is incomplete product data. Components are hard to reuse if there is not enough information available about their properties, condition or origin.

Reround’s new inventory platform was developed to solve exactly that problem. The platform consists of a mobile app and a browser-based information management tool. The solution is aimed especially at property owners, developers, construction companies and consultants who carry out pre-demolition audits. It suits any party that identifies, documents and manages building components before they are reused.

“Building components often go unused because the necessary information about them isn’t available. When a single site can have hundreds of building components, managing the data is challenging. The inventory platform helps collect and manage product data, which makes reuse considerably easier,” says Simo Skogberg, CEO of Reround.

AI speeds up inventorying and information management

When inventorying, the user photographs a building component, after which the app uses AI to identify the product and collect its data. All the user has to do is check the identified data and fill in anything that is missing. A QR code is attached to the component, so that its data and location can be tracked later, for example during transport, storage, refurbishment and reuse.

The platform gives the user an estimate of the price of an equivalent new product and of the climate impact of manufacturing it. This makes the products easier to value and helps identify the environmental benefits of reuse.

Inventoried products move straight from the app into a browser-based management view, where they can be viewed, edited and managed centrally. This helps the customer manage their internal stock and reuse components in their own operations. At the same time, the user gets an overall picture of the inventoried building components, their value, and the cost and environmental benefits that reuse can achieve.

The next step: from inventory to marketplace

Next, Reround will start pilot projects for the inventory platform with its customers. The aim of the pilots is to develop the solution further based on practical experience and to make sure it meets the needs of the industry as well as possible. Over the rest of the year, features such as broader reporting and functions that support the marketplace, including the ability to reserve products, will be added to the platform.

The inventory platform is the first part of Reround’s wider solution, which aims to enable the efficient reuse of building components. When building components due for demolition are systematically identified and documented, they can be directed back into use, first in the customer’s own projects and later between different parties as well.

The next stage of this whole is a digital marketplace, which Reround is building to be ready by the end of the year. The aim is to create, step by step, a service in which building components circulate first within customers’ own projects, then between organisations and finally on an open marketplace. That way, usable building components can be identified, valued and directed efficiently to new uses instead of ending up as waste.

Further information

Simo Skogberg
Co-Founder & CEO
+358 40 554 3579
simo.skogberg@reround.fi

Lotta Kauppinen
Co-Founder & CGO
+358 50 554 4967
lotta.kauppinen@reround.fi