How can barcoding for construction contractors save time and money while reducing project risk?
Barcoding technology streamlines operations by eliminating manual and duplicate data entry, capturing transactions in real time as inventory and assets are added, deployed, moved, or assigned. This ensures efficient management of resources and reduces project risk.
Benefits of Barcoding Technology
Panatrack helps contractors through automated and reliable data capture using smartphone cameras or dedicated scanners. This eliminates wasted time in the office and the field chasing after tools and materials and improves data quality with consistent processes. Accurate, real-time data is crucial for effective project control and decision-making.
Barcode scanning for tool tracking offers similar benefits for various assets used on projects or across the business. This includes hand and power tools, digital devices, gang boxes, office equipment, and mobile devices. Any durable business asset that needs to be accounted for, reserved, assigned, or located can be efficiently tracked. Standard functionality supports inspections, calendar-based maintenance, and reservations for confident planning.
Construction Materials Inventory Management
Contractors need to track materials inventory not only from a procurement and financial standpoint but also in terms of logistics and consumption against projects. Barcode scanning provides a simple, affordable solution to this problem. Panatrack Tool and Equipment Tracking offers flexible and robust functionality to support advanced use cases, including:
- Serial, lot, and batch tracking
- Inventory with expiration dates
- Mobile inventory on service vans and trucks
- Inventory moves from warehouses to marshalling yards to the site, and sometimes back into inventory during component or part replacement
- Prefabricated assemblies, reflecting individual components as part of a nested product structure
Construction Tool Tracking Software
Construction takes place in unpredictable field conditions, leading some contractors to invest in expensive solutions like GPS and BLE for tracking tools. These technologies often create additional costs and complexities, such as device failure, wear, and data silos. Panatracker offers a more sustainable approach:
- Assigns responsibility for tools to individuals or departments
- Tracks tool deployments, moves, inspections, and maintenance
- Manages groups of assets through acquisition, inspection, retirement, and replacement
- Assigns assets to projects, particularly attractive when the asset will be fully depreciated over the project’s course
- Enables asset reservation along with projected return time
Unlike battery-powered tags, barcode scanning is more affordable, reliable, applicable to various use cases, and has lower indirect costs.
Integrated Inventory and Asset Tracking
Panatrack Tool and Equipment Tracking is powerful and configurable enough to track combined assets and inventory. For example, a gangbox can be tracked as an asset and also treated as an inventory location if it contains consumables used on the job or other assets like tools and attachments. Contractors can creatively apply this flexibility to gain a competitive advantage.
