Field technologies and their impact on management of supply chains

Collection of construction fi eld data is not only important to keep track of project performance, such as monitoring progress and productivity, but also for active management of construction supply chains. Both project and supply chain management processes require accurate, complete, and timely fi eld data. However, more than 50% of the problems that are observed at construction sites are associated with inaccurate, missing, and delayed information [Howell and Ballard 1997; Th omas, Tucker, and Kelly 1997] coming from current manual data collection approaches that are limited in terms of timeliness, completeness, and accuracy of the data obtained [e.g., Davidson and Skibniewski 1995; Navon 2005; Reinhardt, Akinci, and Garrett 2004; Sacks et al. 2005; McCullouch 1997; Cheok et al. 2000].