Achieving net zero emissions is no longer a distant ambition. What began as a global mandate has become a daily operational priority, from multinational corporations to regional firms navigating increasingly complex sustainability standards.

For Sellen Construction, a leading general contractor in the Pacific Northwest, balancing a strong project pipeline with the responsibility to measure and reduce environmental impact required more than incremental change. It demanded a smarter, more proactive approach to data.

In 2020, Sellen became one of the first signatories of the Contractor’s Commitment, formalizing its dedication to climate-conscious job sites – from waste diversion and embodied carbon tracking to transparent emissions reporting.

To translate sustainability goals into measurable outcomes, Sellen partnered with Mendix and Sustaira to build a purpose-driven digital solution. By embedding assessments into their operations, Sellen can now optimize strategies in real time, align with evolving policy frameworks, and empower teams with actionable insights.

Sustainably Investing in Low Code

Signatories of the Contractor’s Commitment collaborate closely to exchange best practices, provide an actionable framework, and surface innovative approaches that move sustainable construction forward.

That participation also comes with accountability. Builders who join commit to tracking and self-reporting their carbon emissions data – as well as data in four other impact categories – to promote transparency, drive measurable progress, and reinforce sustainability as a core operational priority rather than a peripheral initiative.

“Having that shared framework has been incredibly helpful. Sustainability covers a wide range of topics, and the Commitment’s framework allows me to narrow the focus, prioritize specific initiatives, and move them through approval and implementation,” shared Angi Rivera, Director of Sustainability at Sellen Construction.

Yet aligning reporting standards was only part of the challenge. With multiple moving parts across the value chain, capturing accurate metrics efficiently required more than manual coordination. To meet the Commitment’s requirements, Sellen needed a digital solution that enabled their small sustainability team to centralize data without adding significant maintenance or overhead.

At first, no such solution existed. Data was gathered manually through Excel sheets, pulling inputs from internal and external systems including ERP platforms, PDFs, and smart forms. The process was time-consuming, fragmented, and difficult to scale.

That’s when Sellen partnered with Sustaira, a Mendix ISV partner focused on accelerating sustainability initiatives for customers with Mendix as the backbone. “Their team was really easy to work with, which was a refreshing change of pace,” Rivera shared. “They saw our vision and really demonstrated the power of low code for an organization like ours.”

Sustaira’s specialized expertise also came in handy. “One of our existing solutions is a carbon accounting platform, which aligned well with Sellen’s organizational structure, so that was their entry point to low code. But they realized they wanted a custom application, and we knew we could deliver it,” shared Jeroen Baars, a product lead at Sustaira.

Seeing Mendix in action, Rivera immediately recognized the difference.

“You might get one or two people deeply trained in a platform like that, but it’s much more challenging to make it accessible and usable across a broader team,” Rivera explained.

The potential to involve additional stakeholders was especially attractive. Each user could view data relevant to their own operations easily, increasing both transparency and accountability.

For the team, the biggest challenge wasn’t collecting the data, it was everything that came after. Turning raw information into usable insights required a cumbersome four-step process:

• Aggregating and synthesizing data
• Entering it into multiple Excel-based calculators
• Translating the results into the Contractor’s Commitment framework
• Manually reworking the information yet again for external reporting.

While the initial aggregation step was unavoidable, the team knew the rest of the workflow didn’t have to be so manual.

Built on Mendix, the resulting solution streamlined that process into a centralized workflow. Working alongside the team, Sustaira helped implement the platform, providing emissions calculations and visualizations while collaborating on the capability to translate outputs directly into the Contractor’s Commitment framework.

With a clearly defined scope and a focused objective, the team began development to lay the digital foundation for measurable, scalable sustainability across the organization.

Counting on a Digital Solution

Carbon accounting tracks an organization’s greenhouse gas emissions across categories such as fuel consumption, transportation, goods & services management (i.e. construction materials like steel and concrete), company fleets, and capital investments. In construction, projects generate significant volumes of material waste and embodied carbon.

Managing these diverse data streams quickly becomes complex. Yet transparency and consistency are non-negotiable. Sustaira offered a launchpad that connects all the different solutions.

“When I log in, I land on a main page, which displays all active solutions and I simply click into the one you need,” Rivera explained.

Data captured within the carbon accounting system can automatically populate related fields in correlated solutions like a Contractor’s Commitment application, reducing duplication. If any input changes, the platform recalculates results instantly across categories. Users select a reporting period, add project locations, complete the required inputs, and immediately see which tier they’ve achieved.

Just as importantly, updates to the Contractor’s Commitment are reflected directly in the platform. Thresholds and tier requirements are automatically adjusted, ensuring accurate measurement without manual rework.

The Contractor’s Commitment solution was created based on Sustaira’s disclosure solution foundation, where questions are organized into achievement tiers – bronze, silver, and gold. Certain questions are grouped into pools where only a defined number must be completed to reach a specific tier.

Feedback also shaped the evolution from version one to version two. “In version one of the solution, the UI had a dropdown to select a tier before seeing the questions,” Baars explained.

Future iterations will further refine how contractor data is segmented and distributed, while enabling locations to seamlessly pass documentation between stakeholders and strengthening collaboration across projects.

With reliable documentation and real-time data at their fingertips, Sellen has achieved:

• Improved tracking accuracy
• Enhanced target setting to support proactive planning
• Increased disclosures required by external partners

The impact extends beyond operational efficiency. In 2023, Sellen published its first-ever Sustainability Report, drawing on comprehensive data collected from job sites across the company – a milestone made possible through the Carbon Accounting solution.

Extending the Impact

With the Contractor’s Commitment creating a shared accountability framework, the opportunity to elevate carbon tracking extends well beyond a single organization. Within the consortium alone, more than 25 additional contractors could benefit from the same digital foundation.

Built as a multi-tenant application on Mendix, the solution allows multiple companies to operate within a single deployment without compromising security or data integrity. Each organization functions within its own secure environment, supported by robust governance controls and clearly defined user roles.

Role-based access ensures the right balance between flexibility and oversight. Some users can configure reporting standards and thresholds, while others are limited to entering answers, locations, and supporting data relevant to their responsibilities.

“That flexibility and available templates allowed us to essentially plug and play separate applications while still operating within a larger system,” Rivera added.

The architecture was intentionally designed for scale, enabling expansion without adding operational complexity. “It’s satisfying to see it not only work for one company but also have the potential to grow beyond that,” Baars said.

The Path to a Greener Future

The Carbon Accounting solution isn’t standing still. As Sellen Construction advances its sustainability agenda, the application is evolving in parallel, supported by a growing team, expanding functionality, and an increasingly ambitious roadmap.

What sets the solution apart is its flexible design. Rather than adapting a generic sustainability tool, the application was built around the realities of several industries: fluctuating job sites, supplier variability, decentralized data sources, and the need for clear accountability across projects. The result is a system that mirrors how people actually work, not how software vendors assume they do.

Future phases will introduce intelligence.

“We’re planning AI features to make it easier for companies to find the right emission factors and work with unstructured data. Right now, a lot of construction data comes in PDFs, which aren’t structured,” Baars explained.

The experience has also reinforced an important lesson: transformation doesn’t require an enterprise-wide overhaul on day one. For Sellen and Sustaira, success stemmed from three fundamentals:

• A clearly defined and contained use case
• A focused, disciplined scope
• Measurable objectives tied to real outcomes

For Rivera, the platform represents more than operational efficiency. It strengthens Sellen’s ability to lead with integrity.