Case Study in Application of Project Scheduling System for Construction Supply Chain Management

Kalyan Vaidyanathan1

1Senior Product Manager, i2 Technologies, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02142, 617/551/-2780, FAX 617/761-2974, [email protected]

Abstract

The AEC industry traditionally operates on trust based relationships formed on a project-byproject basis. Inefficiencies in the AEC industry lead to unreliable project due dates, inability to meet project budgets, and low customer satisfaction levels. In some cases, businesses involved in the AEC industry have capitalized on ill-defined information to increase margins. The paper will discuss these issues in the context of a case study of a large retailer involved in the house reconstruction market. The retailer is attempting to change its business process, manage their supply chain, and manage their orders that have products and services as projects. The paper will describe the difficulties involved in changing the business process and data collection and provide insight into issues involved in implementing the objectives of the retailer. It can be proven that by a fundamental change in the business process, if all the people involved in the project to openly share information, the inefficiencies in the project can be substantially reduced, if not eliminated. This can lead to on-time intelligent procurement of materials, better on-site coordination of labor and material, an overall increased utilization of labor, and ultimately to reduced project delivery time. But in order to realize this objective, businesses must be willing to share proprietary enterprise data, disparate legacy systems have to be integrated to exchange information in a consistent format, and data essential to the new business model needs to be collected. Finally, the savings realized through such streamlining has to be shared among all parties to be fair.

Keywords

Supply chain, collaboration, communication, retail, data collection, information flow, information sharing, business process re-engineering

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Reference

Vaidyanathan, K. 2002. Case Study in Application of Project Scheduling System for Construction Supply Chain Management, 10th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , -. doi.org/

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