Consolidated Contractors is a major contracting company involved in numerous gas and oil construction projects in remote locations around the world, including the United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. One of the major issues facing our project construction teams in a pipeline project is total traceability of pipes. In a 500-mile pipeline construction, you have approximately 75,000 pipes that have to be received on the construction site, tested for damages during shipping, repaired if such damages occur, moved from store to store depending on location of work on pipeline, and then issued to construction. Traceability means that we need to keep track of each pipe from the point when it is delivered on-site to the point where it is put in its final place in the pipeline, including all movement history.
Each pipe carries a barcode that uniquely identifies it. Using this unique number, material control officers use paper forms to record traceability information about each pipe. Information recorded on the paper forms is later fed by a group of data entry operators into the back end material management system.
With tens of thousands of items to be tracked, the process soon becomes unmanageable. Errors abound at all levels. Material control officers (MCOs) make mistakes or use bad handwriting when entering information on their paper forms; data entry operators make mistakes reading paper forms and entering that information into computers.
Automating the Tracking Process
Clearly, a system was needed to make the operation more efficient. The new system had to allow for mobile data collection with barcode scanning abilities, tolerate extreme weather conditions, allow for a quick development cycle, be user-friendly for all levels of end users to work with easily, and stay within a certain budget limit.
Taking all those constraints into consideration, a decision was made to use the Symbol PPT-2800 (Fig. 1). This is a rugged, dust and water-tolerant, Pocket PC 2002-based unit with a built-in barcode scanner. The development platform of choice was Microsoft's Embedded Visual Basic 3.0. Once the appropriate platforms had been chosen, design of the system commenced.
Fig. 1: Symbol PPT-2800, a ruggedized Pocket PC, in the rain
The main operations in which data collection needed to be made more efficient were receiving shipped items, testing items for damages, repairing damaged items, issuing items from store to store, receiving items from another store, and issuing items to construction.
By building intelligent modular forms, we were able to develop only four functional forms to carry out all six operations listed above. "Receive shipped material" and "receive material from another store" were combined. Also, "issue to construction" and "issue to another store" were combined.
Data collected during these operations had to be sent back to a FoxPro-based database application. Also, lookup tables to be used while collecting data remotely had to come from that same FoxPro-based application.
The system had to be developed and deployed before the first shipment arrived. That's exactly what happened. MCOs were then equipped with Symbol PPT-2800s running the Material Management System application.
Fig. 2: Main Menu of the Material Management System.
The first step was to receive all items. This was done using the Receive Material part of the system. The MCO would select the shipment being received and the store to which items were being received (Fig. 3).
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