ARIKON AG will successively sensitize partners and suppliers to the topic of sustainability through dialog. We will agree with each of our subcontractors or suppliers on a policy of guidelines (e.g. regarding waste treatment) that is adapted to the company and economically justifiable but consistent. When awarding contracts in the future, sustainability indicators will be included in the evaluation of subcontractors and suppliers. Preference will be given to partners who, together with ARIKON AG and its customers, pursue sustainable value creation. Regular monitoring will check whether there are any gaps in action.

Older buildings often have significantly increased energy consumption. This results in an increased demand for heating, which often has to be met inefficiently with outdated technology. However, the preservation and expansion of existing buildings offer great potential in saving "gray" CO2. Wooden construction elements, which have an excellent climate balance, are often used in building extensions. Reducing heating costs and CO₂ pollution are therefore topics that are gaining in importance, especially in the building management of existing buildings.

As one of the main service providers in the construction of the Tesla Gigafactory in Brandenburg, ARIKON AG is also facing up to its responsibility in this regard. Even in the first stage of expansion of the company's first European production site, sustainability and environmental compatibility were taken into account when clearing the 90-hectare pine plantation: 400 nesting sites were created outside the forest to be cleared, existing ant hills were relocated by specialists, and reptiles were relocated. The tree cuttings were used as valuable biomass for energy generation in a combined heat and power plant, and the cleared forest area is being replaced threefold by planting elsewhere. With this project, we were able to implement an exemplary circular economy that perfectly illustrates the responsible use of natural resources.

Our data center partner also cooperates exclusively with ESG-compliant companies such as HP, Dell & IBM and uses certified green electricity to operate its servers - as will ARIKON AG from 2022.

As we continue to virtualize our servers, we need less and less hardware and thus contribute to sustainability by reducing electronic waste and eliminating the need to purchase new equipment. The more efficient utilization of the servers also reduces electricity costs.

ARIKON AG's fleet of 101 cars and 51 commercial vehicles, 30% of which are already electric, plug-in or full hybrid vehicles, will in future also consist of at least 50% cars with alternative drive systems. Charging stations at the various company locations will complement the measure.

With increasing digitization, savings are also being made in the following areas:
- fewer trips due to video conferencing
- reduced paper consumption through conversion to electronic archiving systems
- changeover from fixed PC workstations to mobile workstations

The company physician was able to demonstrate a decreasing number of absences from work due to occupational accidents in the amount of 20 in 2020 and 14 in 2021. We not only want to follow this positive trend in the future, but also to reduce absences from work due to accidents in the long term and to prevent serious accidents at work as far as possible. Any absences due to accidents at work are already being analyzed in quarterly meetings with the management and countermeasures are being developed. In the future, we will also place greater emphasis on prevention.

To build up a preventive catalog of health measures for its employees, ARIKON AG is planning partnerships with social insurance agencies. To this end, initial evaluative measures are planned for 2022.

As a project close to its heart, ARIKON AG has been supporting the NORA children's hospice service of the Johanniter in Brandenburg for some time. NORA offers assistance, support and advice to families of seriously ill children, whose life is often limited due to their personal diagnosis. Affected families are relieved and can devote valuable time and energy to the affected child and its needs.

Due to the pandemic, we were only able to continue our training activities in part last year. This makes training planning in the coming months all the more important. Through a certified QM system, we want to ensure an appropriate training quota of at least 15% in 2022. This is already anchored in the QM manual - as is the topic of ESG, which is to be a fixed component of training planning.

What we have learned from the pandemic is that digitalization is also of great importance here, and that further training must also be implemented without the need to be present in person.

In our planning for further training measures, we will take into account the fact that our employees come from 14 different nations. We will therefore devote ourselves to the topic of linguistic integration and generally orient our training measures interculturally.

In the construction industry, the balancing act between family and career is particularly noticeable due to a low quota of women. At ARIKON AG, too, the quota of women in the total workforce, at 13.5%, is significantly lower than in other industries. This is due not only to the partly technical orientation, but also to the tight project-based way of working, which often makes it difficult for female career candidates to reconcile family and everyday working life.

An important factor here is to strengthen confidence in the abilities of female employees. ARIKON AG is already creating opportunities for female employees to work on their own successes by successfully assigning them important projects.

To improve the structural conditions, ARIKON AG will create an internal women's network, which will simplify career entry for new female employees with a mentoring program and ensure in the long term that the internal quota of women is 25% of the workforce by 2025. To achieve this goal, we are starting with training as a first step and will increase our involvement in this segment: for example, at Girls Day at the Ruhr University in Bochum. This nationwide event aims to inspire schoolgirls with workshops and informative events about careers and fields of study in the natural sciences and technology.

In addition to ecological standards, we have a social requirement for the entrepreneurial activities of our subcontractors and suppliers. In addition to the technical factors of the evaluation of our subcontractors and suppliers, other factors will play an important role in the future: healthy working conditions, fair payment and access to social benefits. In the future, we will push ahead with the development of a company-internal evaluation system in which these factors will be included and will play an important role. We will take into account factors such as minimum wages, safety, social benefits or supply chains. These will have an influence on the selection of subcontractors and suppliers on the basis of a scoring system and will be reassessed in an annual internal review. We then enter into an exchange with the companies concerned in order to again highlight the relevance of the issue in a personal discussion and to identify possible consequences. If it emerges that no common denominator can be found in the long term, this will mean that we will not commission certain subcontractors or suppliers with new projects in the future.

The network concept is clearly anchored in our business model. As a "network of competencies", ARIKON AG focuses per se on a partnership-based approach. And not only within our own corporate complex, but also with customers, subcontractors and suppliers.

As a profitable company, ARIKON AG also acts as an active investor - equity investments are a theme of the growth strategy.

Ideally, these companies complement our portfolio in the area of solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises. The business area does not play a decisive role here. The creation of value along our core activities of infrastructure, real estate, engineering and digitalization is central.

We assume entrepreneurial responsibility and help with the further development of individual success factors. Also in the case of succession planning for family businesses, we offer a life's work created with heart and soul the opportunity to develop further under the strong umbrella of the ARIKON Group and thus also to live on.

Another focus of ARIKON AG is on stronger networking with our subcontractors and suppliers. In the course of the digital transformation, we are creating new networks with a variety of measures, e.g., we already offer our companies a technological basis for the direct exchange of project information with project participants as part of their construction activities. With the BIM methodology, we are pursuing a planning approach based on the creation of networked building information and uniform data exchange formats.

At the network meetings with suppliers and subcontractors, we would like to recognize and understand the needs and requirements of our partners even better in order to continuously develop our "network of competencies" for our customers.

As part of its activities as a strategic investor, ARIKON AG has founded a new company, AriInfoWare GmbH, which has developed software for knowledge-based information and object management. This software allows the presentation of structural, spatial, digital documentation of cultural assets, historical buildings, archaeological sites as well as existing buildings and urban areas. Any individual building, but also complete properties or areas can be represented in the form of 2D plans or 3D models. The data is stored in open formats. All aspects of data processing are considered under the criteria of openBIM.

Due to its university founding history, the company participates as a project partner for digitization and research projects in the field of openBIM, point clouds, GIS and HBIM. The goal is to enable economic, effective and sustainable management of data in terms of information acquisition over the entire life cycle of real estate.

We are entrepreneurially engaged in the development of new innovative processes in the construction industry.

Preparation of application in the ZIM network openBIMBiotop
- BIM-supported factory planning in VR. MonArch as openCDE platform with connection to feature server. Consolidated data exchange with validation of BIM data to increase data quality.
- BIM; openCDE; feature server (property sets and classifications)

Preparation request for point clouds
- Punk clouds as an alternative to constructed BIM models for as-built recording. Cost-effective recording of the as-built status with continuous post-capture. Point clouds as digital twin for monitoring and documentation.
- Punk clouds; monitoring; documentation; as-is status.

Construction Project Archive Module
- Merging of different construction projects into one construction archive. Opens up the possibility of cross-project registration and making the construction file usable.
- Merge order structures

GIS module
- Merge available GIS data with existing building data. Validation of GIS data and evaluation of data quality.
– GIS; GEOServer

AirInfoWare GmbH, as part of ARIKON AG, is additionally active here as a provider of ideas and project partner within the framework of research projects.

In cooperation with the renowned energy technology company Doosan Lentjes, we have agreed an exclusive strategic alliance for sewage sludge incineration projects. This partnership enables us to offer high-quality solutions along the entire EPC value chain. Doosan Lentjes has extensive experience in sewage sludge incineration projects with more than 25 successfully delivered incineration plants in Germany and abroad.

The company draws on its OEM expertise in monoincineration and offers advanced sewage sludge incineration concepts based on proven stationary fluidized bed technology. The focus is always on the most efficient and environmentally friendly solutions across the entire process chain. This includes dewatering and drying, incineration, heat recovery and energy generation, flue gas cleaning, and ash removal. Doosan Lentjes' products and services are certified according to TÜV ISO 9001. This ensures full compliance with all required quality standards.

We are entrepreneurially engaged in the development of new innovative processes in the healthcare sector. The focus is on the processing of medical data for better information retrieval. For this purpose, Synaptor Medical GmbH was founded 2 years ago with the aim of establishing innovative medium-sized healthcare solutions in the market. Together with the current partners Bucher Systemlösungen, Biovariance and decidemedical, three products are currently offered:

1. synaptor PreScreening und synaptor Studienmanager
Clinical trials, research data management.
The synaptor PreScreening Suite implements a solution that can be used to initiate decentralized data queries in medical practices via a central study center. With the Study Manager, study data can be collected and processed in compliance with data protection regulations.

2. synaptor BioCore Studio
Clinical trials, digital image collection, management and processing, cloud computing.
synaptor BioCore Studio is a web application for the creation, automation and parallelization of so-called pipelines to process data of any kind. Thus, modules for data processing, modeling, analysis or visualization can be created and executed quickly and easily.

3. OncoVariant
Personalisierte Medizin, Wissensmanagement und Wissenstransfer.
OncoVariant supports physicians in interpreting the genetic alterations of their cancer patients. A manual search for suitable drugs, especially for off-label drugs, is very laborious and time-consuming. The newly developed platform OncoVariant supports and simplifies this search by automatically matching gene variants of the patient with a variety of public databases and checking individual treatment options for the patient. The results are summarized in a report that includes information on gene variants, clinical trials, other evidence, and drugs and their interactions.

Pro Projekt GmbH, as part of ARIKON AG, is additionally active here as a provider of ideas and project partner within the framework of research projects.

A current project funded by the Innovation Fund is EsmAil. This involves the evaluation of a structured and guideline-based multimodal care concept for people suffering from acne inversa. The task of Pro Projekt GmbH was to design a technical, data protection-compliant infrastructure for the distributed collection and processing of study data based on the synaptor medical collaboration platform (smcp).

ARIKON AG sees its social and entrepreneurial activities in these fields of activity as an important commitment in terms of its overall social responsibility to improve preventive health care in order to reduce serious illnesses and their consequences for those affected and their families in the future.