ConVision System Details

Project objective

Work of the system

1. A mobile, 220 V powered terminal is installed near the access to each construction site. It can be easily moved elsewhere.
2. All personnel are given (or purchase) ID badges with their respective names, company names and professions. Arrival and departure are registered by placing the badge against the terminal sensor.
3. Data are dispatched at 3- 10-minute intervals through data transfer equipment to our server where they are processed. All staff with corresponding access rights can see these data through the Internet on their respective PCs – even hundreds of miles away. The system can work anywhere in Europe, wherever we install our terminal and cell phone operators offer data transfer services – which is almost everywhere.
4. Any communication between ConVision and construction companies is electronic.
5. Each company completes an Excel form with its staff names and sends it to ConVision. ConVision prepares the ID badges and delivers or sends them to the relevant construction site under 24 hours.
6. As to access rights, each manager has only access to the construction sites under his responsibility. The Company Manager has access to all construction sites of his company.
7. The basic principle is the following: everybody has access to their own company and can see their own personnel and subcontractors. There are 5 hierarchic levels.
8. E.g., a subcontractor working for large companies can see their personnel on all construction sites where they are present, whatever the main contractor. Provided, of course, our ConVision system is in use on these construction sites.

ConVision benefits

Health and Safety

To improve on-site Health and Safety, ConVision makes it possible to view all personnel accessing the construction site over the last 36 hours. This is possible thanks to the on-line character of the system. When entering “Now” as the required time, you can view the staffing at the very moment. This can mainly help the Construction Site Manager or the security service to see how many persons remain on the site, e.g., at 8 p.m. It is thus possible to search the site, find an injured person, e.g., in the second sub-basement and help him. The same can be done when the construction site is on a highway or elsewhere. Time is the critical factor here. If a worker fails to identify himself when leaving, the search cost will be borne by his company.

Tracking All Persons Present on a Construction Site

• According to the Other Workplace Health and Safety Conditions and Safety Ensuring Act no. 309/2006,
• According to the Construction Act no. 183/2006

The system keeps track of all persons having identified themselves by a badge. All arrival/departure information is accessible to all managers with the relevant access rights throughout the work duration. When the work is completed, the data are transferred to a CD and put to record retention together with the construction site log. The daily list of personnel that is part and parcel of the log can be printed or saved on a CD as an Excel worksheet.

Improving Productivity

Better arrival/departure supervision noticeably improves working hour compliance and makes people work harder. The knowledge that everybody’s arrival is checked on-line from the faraway company headquarters improves compliance in particular among engineering staff.

Cost-Effectiveness

The technology makes it possible to have the cost shared by the various system-data-using parties.

Outsourcing

The system is designed as a full-service one. It can be installed within 3 days from the relevant order, on any construction site.

Output

The data can be exported from the system to construction-site-management SW – comparing actually worked hours to budget – or to wages processing SW.

Companies in need

The system was developed to respond to construction company managers’ demand. Accurate attendance information accessible from one point (i.e. the manager(s) PC) was only available on sites where it was possible to connect the attendance-tracking terminals to a complicated computer network. This is difficult and costly in case of multiple construction sites all over the country, and not cost-effective for short-lived sites. It was also made more difficult by frequent moving of mobile office units.

Accurate information about hours worked, personnel arrivals and departures, and mainly of each employee’s present l ocation (sites across the country) is necessary to run a large construction company successfully. When managing a company having over 2000 persons on its construction sites (not only employees, but subcontractors, too) every day, traditional attendance-tracking methods (manual writing in supervisor’s log) is inadequate and inefficient. It does not provide information immediately – on-line. This was not a problem at times when a construction project took 3-4 years. Today, however, there is enormous pressure to complete each project by the expected date or even before. This information is then necessary, for example, for transferring various specialized construction workers from on site to another.

We were encouraged to develop the new system also by new law that provides for the obligation to note into the site log, on an everyday basis, the full names of all persons accessing a construction site. Our aim was to make this unpopular log-writing task easier for construction site managers.

Previously, a Production Manager was able to obtain a certain amount of information through his assistant who phoned individual sites to know the situation there. This method is very time-consuming and imprecise, and represents extra work for on-site managers.

Most top managers don’t even seek to have such information any more and try to run their sites by performance indicators only. What can happen, however – and, in fact, is happening with some regularity – is that progress reports are late, and a too slow response to an emerging problem increases substantially the construction cost. What I have in mind is that the construction company is then compelled to accept its subcontractor’s conditions that can be outrageous in some cases.

When managing sizeable, but also not so large construction works, capacities – i.e. the number of workers – are the main thing. At the beginning of each work, you prepare a plan defining the number of workers per profession that will be necessary on the site at various times, and then you try to keep to this personnel schedule (standard working hours against hours actually worked on the site, in time). Their performance and work quality only comes second to that. For a Production Manager, timely response to unfavourable development on a construction site due to understaffing on specific job is vital.