MATERIAL CONTROL

The heart of this total solution is the material control function that takes essential materials information from all other sources, combines it together and makes it easily accessible through inquiries and reports. It provides a dynamically updated status of all the material information including quantities required, allocated, requisitioned, on order and issued. This simplifies assessing the impact of changes which may occur in one or more systems such as priority (planning), ETA (purchasing), material quantities (take-off) and allows the overall impact to be easily and rapidly assessed before problems can occur.

Integrating information from purchasing, material take-off, planning and fabrication to ensure that material supply is both timely and in sufficient quantity can be extremely demanding on a large-scale project. The situation changes regularly and integrating and updating the information is an on-going task. The material control function rapidly matches scheduled receipts and orders against prioritized material requirements to suggest optimum usage, highlight expediting requirements and provide look-ahead information to assist in counteracting potential future problems.

Material control also provides full project inventory support and tracks all stock movements, simplifying reconciliation at the end of the project, with client as well as company supplied material and details being supported. Details are maintained for receipt quantities, issued material, cleared material, and on-hand quantities within a warehouse. It can also provide combined issue notes and provide support for bagging and tagging operations.

Once the allocation of the available material has been performed, the system will look at the outstanding requirements together with any requisitions and purchase orders that are still to be processed, and monitor material availability in inventory. It will then generate new requisitions for any shortages, using the tracking number that was assigned during the take-off process and ensure full traceability is maintained, regardless of any material substitutions.

Ensuring that material deliveries occur on a timely basis can be a difficult task. As revisions come through design (take-off), it is easy for this to impact material deliveries, resulting in late arrival or insufficient quantities. The impact of schedule changes can have a similar effect. Design changes may result in a reduction in requirements for some material and an increase for others, which will also affect the delivery schedule. These changes can have a considerable impact on cost and evaluating the full impact of the changes is extremely important. Material may have to be air freighted to arrive on time, work may have to begin out of sequence, or fabrication may be delayed. The impact of these costs on the bottom line can be significant. The costs in additional freight charges and man-hours can be considerable, but by utilizing the material control function these costs can be minimized.