Construction Operations in ORIS

Construction operations allow you to extend a Material Assessment beyond materials and transport to include the carbon and cost of on-site construction and installation activities (A5 Module of Life Cycle Assessment). This article explains the structure of an operation, how ORIS uses it to calculate carbon and cost, and how to build and manage your own libraries.

What Is a Construction Operation?

The Structure of an Operation

Material Quantity: Automated and Manual Entry

Assigning Operations to Materials in the BoQ

Building and Managing Operation Libraries

What Is a Construction Operation?

A construction operation is a defined activity associated with a material in the Bill of Quantities. It represents what happens on site when that material is placed, installed, or processed: the equipment running, the people working, the fuel being consumed. You can assign one or several operations to each material row, depending on how many distinct activities are involved in its installation.

ORIS provides a default library of construction operations focused on road and pavement engineering works. This covers the most common activities such as milling, paving, compaction, and excavation. You can use these directly, customise them for a specific project, or build your own libraries from scratch.

Operations are optional, but important for a complete assessment of both the Product and Construction Stages

Only material quantities and transport calculations are mandatory in ORIS Material Assessments. However, if your assessment scope includes A5 (construction and installation), omitting operations will underestimate total project carbon and cost.

The Structure of an Operation

Every operation has three components: operation-level information and settings, an equipment list, and a personnel list.

OPERATION-LEVEL SETTINGS

These apply to the operation as a whole:

Field		Purpose
Operation name	Required	A clear label identifying the activity, e.g. 'Asphalt paving' or 'Trench excavation'.
Description	Optional	Free text for additional context or notes.
Shift duration	Required	The number of hours the operation runs per day. Used together with productivity and material quantity to estimate total equipment operating time.

EQUIPMENT LIST

The equipment list is where carbon and cost calculations happen. Each piece of equipment in the list has the following fields:

Field		Purpose
Equipment name	Required	Name or description of the equipment unit, e.g. 'Asphalt paver', 'Articulated dump truck'.
Equipment quantity	Required	Number of units of this equipment working simultaneously on the operation, impacting the overall productivity..
Productivity	Required	The nominal rate at which the equipment processes material, expressed in units per hour (e.g. m²/h, t/h, m³/h). This determines how long the equipment needs to run.
Material quantity	Required	The total quantity of material this equipment processes. If the unit matches the material row unit or the transport conversion factor, ORIS fills this in automatically. Otherwise it must be entered by the user.
Energy type	Required	The fuel or energy source: diesel, gasoline, electricity, etc. ORIS uses this to assign the associated emission factor.
Energy usage	Required	Consumption rate of the energy source per hour of operation (e.g. litres of diesel per hour). Combined with operating time, this gives total energy consumption, which is then multiplied by the emission factor to calculate carbon.
Utilisation factor	Required	The percentage of shift time the equipment is actively working. Does not affect carbon, but is used to estimate rental duration and therefore equipment cost.
Cost per day	Optional - cost only	Daily rental or ownership cost for the equipment. Used with utilisation factor and shift duration to estimate total equipment cost.
Energy cost	Optional - cost only	Cost per unit of energy consumed. Multiplied by total energy consumption to give the fuel or electricity cost of the operation.

How ORIS calculates carbon from equipment

Input fields enable estimation of total equipment operating time based on production rates and required quantities. This operating time is used to calculate total energy consumption, which is then converted into carbon emissions using the relevant emission factors.

A similar logic is applied for cost estimation, including both productive and idle time.

PERSONNEL LIST

The personnel list is used exclusively for cost calculations. Each personnel entry includes:

Field		Purpose
Personnel name	Optional - cost only	Role or trade, e.g. 'Site supervisor', 'Plant operator'.
Quantity	Optional - cost only	Number of people in this role working on the operation.
Number of days	Optional - cost only	Approximate number of working days for this role over the duration of the operation.
Cost per day	Optional - cost only	Day rate for this role. Multiplied by quantity and number of days to give total personnel cost.

Material Quantity: Automated and Manual Entry

The material quantity field in the equipment list is the link between the operation and the BoQ. It tells ORIS how much material a given piece of equipment is processing, which in turn determines how long it runs.

ORIS automates this field in two cases:

The unit of the material quantity field matches the unit of the material row in the BoQ directly.
The unit can be resolved using the conversion factor already defined for transport calculations on that material.

When neither condition applies, the field requires manual entry. This is expected behaviour when different pieces of equipment within the same operation work in different units: for example, a paver working in t/h and a roller working in m²/h on the same asphalt layer.

Working with mixed equipment units

Within a single operation, different equipment can have different productivity units. ORIS handles this by requiring a material quantity per equipment row, not a single shared quantity for the operation. Always verify that the material quantity and productivity unit match for each equipment entry.

Assigning Operations to Materials in the BoQ

Operations are assigned at the material row level in the Bill of Quantities. For each material, you can:

Select one or more operations from the ORIS default library.
Select operations from your own custom libraries.
Modify any operation at the assessment level without affecting the library. Changes made in this way are local to that material assessment only.

Local modifications do not update the library

If you customise an operation directly within a Material Assessment, the changes apply only to that assessment. To make changes available across future assessments or to share them with colleagues, update the operation in your library instead.

Building and Managing Operation Libraries

Custom operation Libraries allow you to define reusable sets of equipment, personnel, and operations that can be applied across multiple assessments. To access an existing library of operations, or to create a new one, go to the homepage and select My Libraries, located at the bottom-left of the sidebar.

LIBRARY SCOPE

When creating a library you choose its scope:

Personal library. Accessible only to you. Suitable for individual or project-specific configurations.
Organisation library. Accessible to all users within your organisation. Use this for standardised operations that should be consistent across projects, teams, or disciplines. Libraries can also be scoped to a specific country or set as global.

Note

Once selected, the organisational or personal library scope is locked and cannot be modified.

LIBRARY STRUCTURE

Each library contains three separate lists that must be built in order:

Equipment list. Define individual equipment items with their energy type and usage, productivity and utilisation factor, and optional cost fields (energy cost and cost per day).
Personnel list. Define roles with the day rate field.
Operations list. Compose operations from the equipment and personnel already defined in the library. You cannot add equipment or personnel to an operation that has not first been defined in the library lists.

IMPORTING RESOURCES

To speed up library building, you can import or copy equipment, personnel, or operations from an existing library rather than defining everything from scratch. This is particularly useful when setting up a new project-specific library based on a standard organisational one.

Start from the ORIS default library

The ORIS default library is a practical starting point for road infrastructure projects. Rather than building from scratch, import the relevant equipment and operations from the default library into your own, then modify them to reflect your project context: local equipment types, fuel consumption rates, or cost day rates.