Home / ANALYSIS / Materials / Raising the 'Bar'

A representative process flow diagram

Satish Pendse, HCC’s CIO discusses how better management and optimisation of reinforcement steel is possible with the use of a software called ‘Rebar’.

I nformation technology has become all pervasive. Its being leveraged by all the sectors, including construction, for improving efficiencies and for gaining competitive advantage. In  the last couple of articles, we discussed how world-class ERP solutions such as SAP can be leveraged by the construction industry. In this issue, let’s discuss yet another software application that can be quite useful.

Construction projects face following challenges with regard to reinforcement steel:

• Need to reduce wastage
• Reconciliation of stock
• Overall management of reinforcement inventory
• On-time billing to sub-contractors
• Need to reduce manpower

Story continues below

Advertisement

COMMENT   Is there any formula in calculating wastage of rebar and loss of mix concrete cement in the construction site   1 Comments Read more comments »

Material costs constitute a significant portion of the construction costs and steel/cement form a  large proportion of these  costs. Standard length reinforcement bars are required to be cut into required cut-lengths as per the bar-bending schedule (BBS).

The last piece i.e. off-cut gets wasted or scrapped. For a typical Rs500 crore construction project, the reinforcement component can be between Rs50-90 crore. Even if we save 1-2% of this cost by reducing the off-cuts, then it can be a sizeable saving for that project. We developed software called “Rebar” for optimisation and management of the reinforcement steel.

The software understands the BBS and it also has a track of inventory available in terms of diameter wise reinforcement bars of different lengths. Software has the optimisation engine that is developed using the principles of “linear programming” of “Operations Research”.

This optimisation engine provides best possible cutting schedules so that the wastage can be minimised. The system also allows us to keep track of off-cut pieces so that they may be used in future to reduce the wastage further.

A representative process flow diagram is as above:
Some of the important reports that can be generated using this software are as under:

1. Cut-length required to be carried out for a bar
2. Date, vendor, diameter wise receipts
3. Diameter wise reconciliation
4. Rolling margin and stock-list
5. Pending requisitions
6. Structure, contractor and diameter wise fabrication and dispatch reports.