Materials are one of the most important parts of your construction project. You can’t build something with nothing. But material management isn’t always treated with the care and intention it deserves.
Common material management issues in construction
Here are a few of the most common issues in material management:
Damaged materials
Materials can get damaged for a lot of reasons. Natural disasters like tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, earthquakes, wildfires, or hurricanes are common culprits when it comes to damaged materials.
But accidents and negligence are also leading causes of damaged materials. Cranes or hoists can fail, resulting in dropped loads, and vehicles like forklifts can collide with materials, damaging them. Fires caused by flying sparks from machinery or employees smoking in areas they shouldn’t be also creates problems.
Misplaced or stolen materials
Construction materials don’t grow legs and walk away. But they do disappear sometimes. Occasionally, materials get stolen, but often they’ve just been misplaced.
That can happen for a lot of reasons, ranging from poor site security to not checking delivery addresses or accepting the wrong materials at delivery.
Poor tracking
It’s important to have a good understanding of where materials are so that you can make sure everything is where it needs to be when it needs to be there. Outdated tracking methods just don’t cut it, though.
Paper tracking methods can get lost or damaged, and complicated software can be easy to misread and time-consuming to get right in the first place, leading to mistakes and poor visibility.
Quality issues
Poor quality controls are another common cause of material issues on the jobsite. Quality assurance isn’t optional — it’s a crucial component of any construction project. But when timelines become constrained and workers rush to meet deadlines, it often falls by the wayside, which means material flaws or damage may not be detected until it’s too late.
That results in further delays, and it takes up more time in the end than a simple quality inspection.
5 tips for better material management
The good news is, you don’t have to get stuck with the problems caused by poor material management. Improvement is always an option. Here are a few ways you can do that:
Encouraging employee accountability
Better material management — and better management in general — starts with fostering a workplace culture of accountability. That also means leading by example.
The first step is to set clear expectations for both workers and project owners. Make sure employees know what’s expected of them when using and tracking materials.
Likewise, it’s important to alert project owners when delays occur and deadlines need to be pushed back. A delayed deadline is better than a missed one.
Having proper storage areas
Keep everything in its proper place, whether that’s weather-proof storage or simply a designated spot on the jobsite for certain materials. This helps ensure you don’t lose materials on the jobsite and can help prevent damage, too.
Monitoring the jobsite with reality capture tools
Jobsite security matters. Reality capture tools like EarthCam, TrueLook, and HoloBuilder can help with basic surveillance, which drastically improves chances of material recovery, something that’s already notoriously difficult in construction, as well as providing evidence for insurance claims.
It also helps boost jobsite visibility, which is important for monitoring jobsite progress and visual data. Drones, like those provided by DroneDeploy also help give a bird’s-eye view of the jobsite.
Better quality assurance
Every employee on the jobsite plays a role in quality assurance. Once quality starts to slide on the jobsite, or when employees start to view it as someone else’s problem, you run into recurring issues that compound on each other and negatively affect project health and ROI.
By implementing quality tools like observations, you can empower employees to be proactive about quality issues by spotting them early and alerting the team so they can be addressed in a timely manner.
Using a digital production tracking system like Raken
Effective production tracking is difficult. And lots of companies fall behind when it comes to tracking materials, equipment, and labor. Whether it’s old-fashioned pen and paper tracking methods or overly-complicated software that is built for Silicon Valley tech bros (instead of workers in the field) lots of production tracking tools just fall short.
Raken makes it easy. Our materials tracking tool enables workers to record material usage on mobile devices or a tablet, publish automated reports, and get detailed analytics. Combined with our equipment management and resource scheduling capabilities, we’re a comprehensive production tracking solution built with a field-first approach.
Improve jobsite management with Raken
We’re your all-in-one tool for the field. We go beyond just production tracking to include project management and safety tools too, ranging from daily reports to observations, incident reporting, toolbox talks, and checklists.
Schedule a demo with us today so we can walk you through our features and discuss your company’s needs to see if we’re the right fit for you.