4 ways Installers can leverage a material tracking system

Did you know that tracking your materials from manufacturing to installation has the power to drive supply chain transparency?

How? Because materials pass many hands and are the one common denominator across all key stages of a construction project’s supply chain. Meaning the insights you gain from understanding where your materials are at any given time helps connect field and office teams, keep on-site teams informed and drive financial predictability. 

If you’re an installer looking for a solution to help standardise processes like daily reporting, just-in-time deliveries, drawing revisions and much more, then a material tracking system might be the tool for the job. 

If you’re still not convinced, below are 4 ways Installation subcontractors can fully leverage Matrak’s material tracking system to their advantage. 

For most, completing thorough and accurate inspection test plans is a laborious and time-consuming task. It requires a worker to manually print, fill out, scan and file each document when using a paper-based system. This also presents an extra risk when documentation is lost, damaged or destroyed on-site.

By digitising your ITPs, you have full control over managing and reporting on the quality of your work. Matrak allows you to:

Getting the correct materials delivered in the right order, at the designated time and to the correct location on site, has always been an industry challenge. The ability to coordinate JIT deliveries means projects can be working at full capacity and keep to time schedules.

In Matrak, easily call up accurate product quantities to site and keep your work to the project schedule. Being able to view your project’s interactive floor plans helps you to understand the progress of the build.

You can select the materials needed on site directly off the drawings, reviewing which stillages and what location they’re in. Add or remove materials from the selection, then specify the required delivery date.

Having a centralised flow of communication is a key factor when responding to risks and preventing them from ‘snowballing’. Using excel sheets and paper documentation to report on issues happening on site creates a lack of visibility, putting your company at risk. Paper reporting is harder to manage when issues arise on the job, which creates delays when communicating with site teams.

While Matrak cannot predict the risks themselves, Matrak lets you monitor risks during the installation phase of your project to help you take mitigation actions. Having an activity audit trail that tracks the materials before they arrive on-site, means that it gives you more data to control the risk of things going wrong during installation.

Proving that your site team is not responsible for supplier or logistical errors can be an expensive and frustrating process.

Trying to find information on lost in transit items, materials being delivered short and defective items requiring a re-order not only wastes valuable time and money but requires extra resources to fix the error. It also adds supply delays during critical stages of the project.

Protect your work with built-in, real-time digital audit trails and attach photos to installed materials at any stage and location of the construction lifecycle.

Attaching photos along with Matrak’s built-in auditing functionality provides quality insurance and proof of work that protects your bottom line.

Matrak was founded in 2017 and provides innovative mobile-first end-to-end supply chain tracking software solutions to the construction industry. We believe in the significant benefits to Site Managers, contractors, and developers and construction supply chains generated from data-driven insights through the materials tracking process.

Industry-wide challenges are best solved through collaboration, and Matrak’s material tracking app strives to bring the construction industry together around its most fundamental component – materials.

Our app is available on all iOS, Android and Windows devices and has helped more than 157 projects in over 5 countries to enable the power of supply chain transparency.

Book a demo to learn more today.