Impact of fast automated tracking of construction components on labor productivity

Even though the fundamental importance of construction components in any given project, industry practices still solely rely on the human ability to individually control thousands of these components on the field. This lack of automation frequently results in critical errors that negatively affect project cost and schedule. Recently, though, the undemonstrated notion that materials tracking processes can highly benefit from the implementation of information technologies has been gaining wide industry acceptance. This paper presents the results of a massive study on a large industrial site that aimed at quantifying the impact associated with automating materials tracking processes on craft labor performance. For this purpose, field records from manual and automated tracking processes were collected during the trial. Then, the influence of the automated tracking process on construction performance was determined by considering the manual approach as the baseline for comparison. The results indicate that information technologies can significantly enhance craft labor productivity.