A great portion of the problems in the workflow arises from the construction site. Often during installation, design and/or production are found to require revisions, which are hard to predict at the field under various circumstances (marked as exceptions in Fig. 1). The demands for changes in design and manufacturing processes need to be informed to the factory, which causes frequent interruptions in manufacturing. After revisions, the installers need to be informed when the revised
products are expected to arrive at the site so as to avoid further delays and meet the installation schedules. In order to minimize these interruptions and delays, the demands must be handled in a timely manner between installers and designers/engineers; however, this communication is currently inefficient due to the bottleneck in the information flow
in the company—the relevant information is mostly updated manually in an asynchronous manner (by occasional phone calls and recordkeeping) by several employees that have different information on hand at the moment. Also, such communication methods are not appropriate to convey the right information at the right time and incur additional communication overhead to locate the right personnel. The delay in information flow also occurs at the fabrication site. The present method used for material tracking during fabrication is to keep Microsoft Excel spreadsheets updated on a weekly basis. This is done in an office outside the actual fabrication site, which requires the employee to be away for an extended amount of time to enter this data manually. The spreadsheet contains all the data related to on-going jobs and is
the sole method of recording data for future reference. Daily communication for manufacturing projects is verbal and prone to being outdated for current needs.
The research team's goal was to remove the bottleneck in the information flow by deploying a material tracking system on the cloud where the data are automatically updated and shared between employees seamlessly so that each user can obtain the required information in a consistent and timely manner. As a consequence, the mechanical contractor can expect to reduce inefficiencies in material usage and personnel time, and thus improve their performance in terms of fabrication and installation schedules and costs. The detailed workflow associated with the proposed system is illustrated as follows: