right information at the right time to the right users. More specifically,
this research will develop a cost-effective materials management and
tracking system using the state-of-art information technology (IT),
i.e., cloud computing and RFID, and study its feasibility for the SMB to
improve their current workflow through increased supply chain visibil-
ity. Cloud computing and RFID have been gaining great attention by
manufacturing and production industry for their supply chain manage-
ment owing to their capabilities to enhance supply chain visibility while
reducing operation and maintenance costs [5–7].
The proposed system is developed to
- automate data collection and provide real-time visibility in the
construction chain;
- provide accurate information in a timely manner to avoid the
bottleneck in information flow among the participants in the
chain; and
- improve communication and coordination between SMB contrac-
tors and their project teams using user friendly interfaces at low
cost and maintenance requirements.
To this end, this research is designed with the following components:
1) workflow analysis and requirement analysis to enhance the current
workflow; 2) prototype system development with cloud computing
and RFID; 3) discrete event simulation to estimate the performance of
the proposed system in the complex settings; and 4) statistical analyses
to test the system in the field. The system is developed and tested with
the SMB contractor to track their duct and pipe spools from design release
to fabrication and to installation. The paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents the literature review. Section 3 describes the current
workflow in the studied SMB as well as recommendations to improve
it. Section 4 analyzes the requirements for the system to improve the cur-
rent workflow. Section 5 describes the developed system and its architec-
ture. Section 6 presents the discrete event simulation and field tests to
evaluate the performance of the proposed system. Section 7 concludes
this paper with research findings and potential future works.