Australian company leverages Octave solution to establish an efficient materials management system, streamlining processes and reducing risk for railway line project.
Identifying goals
Calibre Global (Calibre) is involved in major projects, which involve complex management and contract processes. The Australian company sought sophisticated management tools to effectively manage these processes and decided to implement a materials management system.
Overcoming challenges
Improve efficiency of administering contracts by moving away from a spreadsheet-based system
Enhance integrity of information to minimize risk and reduce costs
Streamline processes and workflows to eliminate duplication of work
Realizing results
Calibre determined Intergraph Smart Materials (now Octave Loop Core) was the best option because it is proven technology, and has delivered improved procurement efficiency for industry-leading engineering firms around the world. In Australia, Smart Materials is widely used by engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies, and is also highly regarded by owner operators.
“Smart Materials was the clear choice for us as it enables a seamless materials management process, from engineering through to procurement and final delivery to the project site,” said Aaron Shaw, procurement and material lead at Calibre. “This ensures we can establish an efficient and effective materials management system from cradle to grave.”
Previously, the manual process of material take-off (MTO) and verifying and raising purchase requisitions at Calibre was very time-consuming. There was also a high risk of error as often, the requisitions are badly written and would not have the required information for procurement to process. This then led to guesswork or clarifications, which ultimately delayed the processing of the information.
Calibre implemented Smart Materials for a railway line project. Using the Octave solution, it was able to automate many aspects of the project’s material requirements: from cataloging bulk items, assemblies, creating tag items, and drawing exports using metadata, to price look-ups and creating electronic requisitions.
This streamlines the overall process and subsequent procurement, while reducing risk and the number of work-hours for processing. For example, with Smart Materials, multiple requisitions can be created in a single system MTO job run in less than a minute, which would normally take a few hours if done manually.
Generating material requisitions can also be automated for specific areas, such as commodity group types and others. The bill of materials (BOM) can be approved directly in Smart Materials, automatically releasing the MTO in the system. Data is also legible and accurate, thereby minimizing the generation of lost man-hours that would have been spent on verification or correction of information. Requisitions can also be exported to other systems, ensuring accurate data transfer with cost and time savings.
Using Smart Materials, the goods receiving process is simplified. Inspection release data is transferred to the release note in Smart Materials, and all release note items are populated onto documents. The site material controller just needs to verify the quantity and receipt to a warehouse location. This minimizes surplus of materials and ensures the correct items are delivered for construction. Goods are then easily issued with clear, detailed documentation containing relevant codes, descriptions, quantity and warehouse location. By using facility codes, locations, and construction work packs data, this aids with the overall asset management and enables tracking of the materials to their final install locations.
With web-based, automated reporting capabilities, Smart Materials provides quick and easy access to accurate information, including BOM reports, vendor data, expediting and requisition workloads, events, tasks and many more. Traditionally, Calibre would spend over 200 hours manually generating such reports for its projects, but Smart Materials eliminates this step, delivering significant cost and time savings to the company. The Australian company did an analysis to quantify the benefits of the Intergraph system, and Calibre evaluated just the monthly report writing requirements. The savings from this alone already more than covered the system’s overall monthly cost, including administration and infrastructure.
“Smart Materials has significantly streamlined our materials management process through enhanced automation, delivering tremendous benefits to Calibre,” said Shaw. “Without a doubt, the integrated materials management system has boosted our productivity, with real cost savings from the increased efficiency.”
Moving forward
Calibre now plans to standardize on the use of Smart Materials for its rail materials management needs and will consider extending the use of the Intergraph solution to all of its future major projects.
