Ecmweb 7018 Job Site Mobile Devices Pr
Ecmweb 7018 Job Site Mobile Devices Pr
Ecmweb 7018 Job Site Mobile Devices Pr
Ecmweb 7018 Job Site Mobile Devices Pr
Ecmweb 7018 Job Site Mobile Devices Pr

A New APProach to Logistics

Jan. 22, 2015
Rosendin Electric recognized the latent power of mobile technology. When capabilities met desire, the hunt for apps that address stubborn job-site dysfunction began.

To the uninitiated, a bustling construction site can look like a tangled mass of confusion. Materials stacked here and there, workers and equipment scurrying about like ants, a structure somehow taking shape amidst the apparent chaos. It takes a seasoned professional to understand what’s really going on here. Yes, it really is a kind of controlled confusion, and, at times, it’s as bad, or worse, than it looks.

Take it from Rosendin Electric, Inc. After 95 years of operating out of San Jose, Calif., the electrical contractor knows that on one level that picture is deceiving. Despite appearances, there truly is a method to the apparent madness. But on another, it recognizes that an element of anarchy is indeed present on almost every job site — where the left hand doesn’t always know what the right is doing and where miscommunication, mistakes, and crossed wires can loom large.

More Rosendin Electric workers are using mobile devices on the job site, opening the way for mobile apps (Photo courtesy of Rosendin).

This reality is so chronic and potentially harmful that the company has recently begun to take some innovative steps to bring more order to its little corner of the construction process. Gambling on the adaptability of its workforce and suppliers and the raw power of information technology, Rosendin Electric has plunged deeper into the world of mobile computing, equipping workers with company-owned handheld devices and developing robust apps for them that directly attack some of the underlying causes and corrosive consequences of job-site disorganization.

Isolating the bottlenecks

The apps, rolled out this year on a few select jobs, target one of the most confounding logistics problems Rosendin Electric — and other subcontractors — routinely contend with: the nagging uncertainty about whether materials needed at the job site will arrive where and when they’re needed, and in the required specifications, quantities, and configurations. Far too often, all or some of these conditions aren’t met, hampering productivity and elevating the risk of costly errors.

These problems can cut across all elements of a contractor’s operations, but the purchasing department is often in the crossfire, as Rosendin Electric’s vice president of purchasing can attest when communications breakdowns lead to frustrating, unacceptable, and largely avoidable scenarios.

“When we have something delivered to the site, it kills us when we get a call a day later from the field saying, ‘Where’s my material?’” says Randy Hirotsu. “There’s no place for that in this day and age.”

Enter Rosendin Electric’s new apps. Built to digitally corral all of the disparate elements of information exchange needed to move materials and equipment from vendors to a specific job-site location, they were conceived as a way to deliver a better method of real-time, on-the-ground materials management. Accessible on a mobile device, they’re structured to empower job-site decision makers with a more convenient and reliable paper-alternative method of generating, routing, amending, and checking-in materials orders. And they’re built so that every critical action along the way is captured by all stakeholders in the communications loop, minimizing the chances for surprises, mix-ups, and errors.

Rosendin Electric’s job-site apps are designed to be user-friendly.

Using the so-called “material and tool management app,” Rosendin Electric workers in the field use their handheld devices to effectively assemble and place orders via digital pre-construction planning forms. They’re simultaneously routed to the purchasing department, equipment yard, tool manager, and others in the inventory-confirmation, approval and fulfillment loop.

Another Rosendin Electric-inspired app also comes into play. A “QR code app” brings vendors directly into the information-exchange mix by generating Quick Response (QR) matrix barcodes they attach to packages of products destined for Rosendin. The digital, mobile device-scannable codes, which are also generated for shipments of products finished at Rosendin Electric’s pre-fabrication operation, provide another layer of assurance that all orders are accounted for, tracked, and wind up at the correct destination.

Simplifying the process

The duo of the apps and the handheld devices form a tool that Rosendin Electric is betting will lead to improving productivity and a reduction in errors that often plague jobs’ materials handling component. While they don’t fundamentally change what’s done, their prospective value lies in changing how things are done.

On the ground, says Mike Hamilton, a Rosendin Electric construction site superintendent, time and its expenditure is critical. And it’s also about “TIEM — tools, information, equipment and materials.” In tandem with the handheld devices, the apps address both of those considerations more directly and efficiently. A robust app that effectively links all decision makers, he says, can replace potentially thousands of pieces of paper — requisitions, bills of materials and lading, purchase orders, invoices, task planners, and the like. And it can streamline the time-consuming and risky process of passing them back and forth to initiate actions and gain approvals, clearances, and confirmations.

“What might have been a five-day process of getting a job started is now reduced to five or 10 minutes,” he says. “In a matter of minutes, a materials order can be in the hands of a purchasing agent.”

At the outset, Hamilton was intrigued by the ability to save time on the ground and make the ordering process easier. As development proceeded, especially as the QR code app entered the picture, it became more evident that their value is also realized in the post-ordering phase.

“To me, the original intent was to increase the turnaround time of materials in the field, to speed up the process and to make a clean transition of ordering and getting materials back on site,” he says. “It ended up that we also have a tracking mechanism and the ability to see where materials sit from the time of ordering to the time of installation. It’s all very real-time.”

Necessity, then invention

Both Hamilton and Hirotsu were instrumental in sparking the thinking that led to the apps’ development, a process ultimately initiated and overseen by the company’s vice president and chief information officer, Sam Lamonica. Hamilton, vexed by the persistent materials handling glitches encountered on job sites, and Hirotsu, newly inspired at the time by exposure to some new thinking about how to bring more efficiency to the purchasing function, brought their concerns to Lamonica and floated the idea of an app-based solution.

A champion of mobile technology who in 2011 spearheaded adoption of a more automated, mobile device-based approach to QA/QC in the field, Lamonica quickly recognized the potential. Well-acquainted with off-the-shelf mobile apps and their steady adoption on Rosendin job sites for a range of specialized functions, Lamonica put his IT department to work. The mission: figure out whether an app could capture and promote better management of the company’s materials purchasing and handling function. For Lamonica, here was a clear-cut challenge to leverage technology to solve some very tangible and nagging problems that had long defied solutions.

“Our development effort was focused on ways to solve some specific problems presented by the field and purchasing departments,” Lamonica says. “They needed the ability to better handle the supply chain — from the time something is ordered until the time it actually arrives at the site and location where it needs to be installed.”

Working off the Autodesk BIM 360 Field software platform, Lamonica’s group fashioned the material and tool management app with the assistance of an outside programming contractor. It integrated existing document repository software that stores job documentation, specifications, and interactive plans and drawings, and piggybacked on existing mobile technology the company had developed, eliminating the need for new additional software and associated training. Developed separately, the cloud-based QR code app was designed entirely in-house.

“Electronic orders get pushed out to the respective fulfillment groups and then shipments are tracked electronically through to delivery to the job site,” Lamonica says. “Our goal is to merge these two apps at some point.”

Treading lightly

For now, Lamonica is focused on the challenge of rolling the apps out to the field. Since they were created, the apps have gone through several iterations based on actual field usage. Deployment has been limited so far to some of the bigger projects in the Bay Area, close to Rosendin Electric headquarters.

Sites have been selected partly on the basis of the crews’ comfort with mobile technology, the receptiveness to trying a new approach, and the nature of the particular job and its materials supply chain infrastructure. Eager to see how the apps work on the ground, the company has had to be certain that it has crews with the inclination and patience to learn a new approach.

“We’ve seen instances where with others apps we’ve used, if they’re not accommodating the staff’s needs they’ll stop using them and go back to the old method,” Lamonica says. “And it depends on whether the end-user community consists of tech adopters or tech laggards.”

On most of the jobs where the apps have been used so far, Hamilton says the results have been encouraging. If crews work to invest the time it takes to learn and understand how to use them, they appear to work as intended, producing time savings and improved order and delivery accuracy.

“Once they grasp the change and understand what it does and how it can work for them, they don’t seem to want to let it go,” says Hamilton. “And that’s one of the problems. The next time someone who’s used it goes to another project where it’s not in use they want it.”

The ‘buy-in’ factor

Many of those who do embrace it appear to do so enthusiastically. Since the apps and handheld devices put power directly into the hands of foremen and other job-site decision makers, there’s early evidence that they seem to yield more engaged workers, Hamilton says. Knowing that the technology, when properly utilized, can make their jobs easier and the project progress more efficiently, workers with those responsibilities seem to exhibit a new seriousness of purpose.

“I’ve had some guys showing up early because they’re concerned about what’s going on with this new process,” Hamilton says. “I look at this as a way to get them more vested in both the project and the app-related tasks that they have in front of them.”

As it reduces errors and simplifies communications, mobile device-based management on the job site is also producing some tangible benefits for workers. There’s less time spent calling and e-mailing to check and double-check on the location of materials and the status of orders and deliveries, Hamilton says. The app also helps prevent costly ordering mistakes by restricting selections to a pre-approved materials list.

“We now know where everything is more of the time, and we have fewer mistakes showing up in the end product,” he says.

The apps have improved efficiency and productivity, but so far have not produced any indication that job-site manpower needs can be reduced. While that would clearly be a welcome by-product, Lamonica says the apps are being evaluated now strictly on the basis of how much they improve standard procedures and outcomes. It’s still a work in progress to put a number on that, but he’s satisfied progress is being made.

“There have been some obvious soft gains, in that we’re not marching around out there with as much paper, writing things down and sending stuff back and forth, and sending endless emails about lost supplies and shipments,” he says. “Once we get more into a fuller deployment mode and have had the ability to do front- and back-end tweaking, we may get into doing some time and motion studies.”

Wave of the future

Rosendin Electric is optimistic that the mobile app approach will pay dividends over time, leading to the development of future new apps. The robustness of the technology and the clever, practical design are part of the reason. But an equally important factor might be the growing comfort with using mobile devices. A younger workforce more attuned to technology and mobile communications virtually guarantees that the learning and adoption curve will continue to flatten. The apps’ value can only be realized if handheld devices become a regularly used tool.

“I foresee the next wave of foremen and purchasing agents being much more wired to computer applications than the old world of paper forms,” Hirotsu says. “And the next generation of workers is going to be more tethered to mobile devices. That’s where this is going to take off.”

As that takes its almost inevitable course, Rosendin Electric is concentrating on how to further tweak and refine the apps’ capabilities so they can be confidently folded into more Rosendin Electric projects. The basic structure of the apps is proving to be well-designed, Lamonica says, but the apps are not yet in a one-size-fits-all configuration.

“We’re well past the experiment stage, but what we haven’t done yet is push them out as generally available,” Lamonica says. “We’ve muscled through some significant pilots with the apps, and our focus now is on how we can push them out to more of our job sites and more of the regions we operate in.”

For now, the most important part of the initiative may lie not in the apps’ physical reach, but in their effectiveness where they’ve been used. Because the ultimate goal is to fundamentally change how things are done in the service of efficiency, economy, and higher quality work, Rosendin Electric is interested more in quality and less in quantity.

“I’d say we’re in an ‘it works, let’s see if we can break it’ mode,” Hirotsu says, where part of the mission is to aggressively root out, expose, and fix any glitches. “But my anecdotal evidence that it’s working is that there seems to be fewer situations today where a guy is walking around a job site for a half hour just trying to find stuff.”              

Zind is a freelance writer based in Lee’s Summit, Mo. He can be reached at [email protected].

SIDEBAR: Efficiency Apps Suggest Greater Role for Suppliers

In creating new mobile apps to streamline materials flow on job sites, Rosendin Electric, Inc., had to gain the cooperation of key vendors to be able to implement better ways of tracking shipments. The San Jose, Calif., contractor’s QR code app requires the cooperation of suppliers to put the scannable identifying codes on products bound for Rosendin Electric job sites.

It took some explaining to get vendors to understand Rosendin Electric’s concept, but they ultimately got it, says the company’s vice president of purchasing Randy Hirotsu.

“While certain individuals knew exactly where this was going, some introductory conversations produced a few ‘what the heck are you talking about?’ looks,” he says.

But the fact they ultimately bought in was encouraging, he says, because he’s convinced that contractor suppliers are destined to assume a more collaborative stance with customers. As contractors work to make materials handling more efficient, suppliers will have more incentive to embrace shared responsibility.

“In a quirky way, when we do our part right and develop a new and improved way of doing things, it can help our vendors become more efficient as well,” Hirotsu asserts. “Suppliers are becoming more than standard inventory pick-pack-ship vendors who throw boxes on a pallet; they’re more extensions of customers as opposed to being suppliers where we tell you what we want and you put it together however you want.”

Hirotsu is keen on understanding more of the symbiotic relationship between contractors and suppliers — and how that can lead to more efficiencies in purchasing and supply chain management. Leading up to his cosponsorship of the apps proposal, he instituted some changes to how materials were purchased and supplied to a Rosendin Electric job.

“We took a whole different approach to how we procure and deliver materials, something which turned out to be a test run for these apps,” he says. “It proved how efficient, profitable, and productive this could be.”

About the Author

Tom Zind | Freelance Writer

Zind is a freelance writer based in Lee’s Summit, Mo. He can be reached at [email protected].

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