Simplifying on-site report completion for material management

Material management is an important issue for project management. Since construction workers report the on-site material information, construction managers are able to understand the correct material status. The above procedure forms a kind of information flow among construction workers, application systems, operation devices and construction managers. However, this study found that communication barriers affected the on-site information flow, despite various information technologies were applied at the construction site. Therefore, this study proposed an approach that integrated wireless and speech technologies for simplifying on-site report completion. When the construction workers described the inspecting results via speech, the proposed system automatically analyzed the received details and submitted the confirmed records. In a material management case study, the construction workers successfully completed the required material reports via speech. The test results also demonstrated that the construction workers worked more efficiently. In summary, this study can be considered to be useful research for similar issues in construction management.