Save Money by Better Tracking of People and Equipment - Know Where They Should Be!

  Knowing where your people and equipment are, that they are in the right place at the right time and in the right condition is a challenge in multi-site operations involving directly employed and contracted resources.

  A major source of down time is individuals or equipment not being available, this is pure waste that company resource management can reduce. There are many reasons for missing people and equipment;

• leave,

• being double booked,

• off on training,

• not qualified or insured to work,

• maintenance or repairs,

• Lost or stolen equipment.

  Some of these are unavoidable, like repairs to a piece of equipment, others can be avoided and are a major source of unnecessary delay and cost. It is difficult enough to track where directly employed individuals are across a multi-site organisation, let alone subcontractors as well.

  Equally you do not want to turn tracking employees into an industry in its-self. What you need to know is that an individual or piece of equipment can be in the right place at the right time. This requires quite a simple process of identifying where people or equipment is required in the future and then overlaying on to this picture the events that mean that they won't be available. This is often done with a wall chart and for simple operations this could be the best solution. In the old days 'T card' or personnel boards were used, however, these are time consuming and are stationary making it impossible to share across sites. More recently companies have been using spreadsheets, but these are also difficult to share and don't link up with the other information from across the organisation.

  In construction a particular problem is knowing who and what is where. Site managers can manage the people and equipment that turn up to the gate, but if they don't show there is little they can do. They will know if someone is on leave for a week or an apprentice has a block in college, but what if they have 1 day on training or are doing 2 days on another site? Then it is better to be able to have identified this problem in advance so there is plenty of time to sort it. This is very difficult when you are talking about more than 15 people, as there will be so many different things going on specific to each individual. There is so much specialisation and close sequencing in modern construction that not having an individual on site when they are needed can be a real problem.

  Ameliorate provides construction task management consultancy services as well as an on-line solution to many of the problems faced by operations managers in construction and built environment companies.

  If you want an easy to use, low cost and modular tool to support you then please go to http://www.ameliorate-ltd.co.uk to see more or email sales@ameliorate-ltd.co.uk or call 07734508837.

By Mark Buckton