How to Reduce job site waste and optimize your workforce with the feature by Kwant

“It’s like Uber for construction resources.”

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According to construction demolition, the volume of construction waste generated will roughly double worldwide to 2.2 billion tons by 2025. To give more context, in 2018 the United States generated roughly six million tons of construction waste.

Generally, 30% of all materials on a construction project will be considered waste. Kwant mission is to reduce waste by connecting fragmented data on the jobsite in real-time.

The goal for any construction project is to  deliver on time and under budget. When managing multiple projects across different geographical locations or managing multiple zones within a single site, it can be challenging to optimize materials or workforce to meet those demands.

Materials can be delayed, critical information can be missing, schedules change, and materials can be stolen or stored at an incorrect location. According to a recent study, these issues are common occurrences, hence why the Kwant team collaborated with several industry leaders to design and launch a new feature to solve this problem.

Radio communication has been the industry standard for communicating urgent needs and requests on a jobsite. The perks of radio communication are many but it has two major drawbacks. Radios operate between limited distances, and all the communication is lost once it's over and out.

“When you stack structured data and long-range communication together, you get something groundbreaking. We can get actionable insights, like which trade and zone have a higher percentage of waste or being able to find the optimal production quantity to avoid waste. ”

When you have clear communication, you understand where your workforce or materials may be without the distractions of verbal communication. With the click of a button, you can share materials and workforce with the ‘Need More’ feature within our Kwant app.

Drastically reducing project waste

Planning and ordering materials for a project or multiple locations can be a difficult task. What if you could do it all in one place? When there are more materials needed for a project location, one runs the risk of material waste and overspending. Now, with the ‘Need More’ feature, materials can be shuffled and shared between project locations within the project.

A project manager can simply open the Kwant app and create a request for materials, and select a GPS-based location to a schedule where the excess or new materials should go!  

With the ‘Need More’ feature, you can drastically reduce material waste. After materials like concrete or steel beams are requested, you can then tag a vehicle and track the travel time on a map.

There is also a ‘past activity’ feed within the mobile app so you can analyze the history of shared and requested materials, and their quantities, and benchmark how much waste was reduced on the project.

“Materials like concrete have a short life span of 60 mins to 90mins once it’s dispatched from the plant and in many projects, there is a massive amount of concrete being wasted every day. Using Kwant’s real-time ‘Need More’ app you can avoid this waste. ”

Right workforce, right location, right time  

Managing your construction workforce across different job sites can get very complicated. Imagine having the flexibility to shuffle your workforce from location to location depending on the project or hours needed?

With the ‘Need More’ feature, project leaders can become flexible with their team’s schedule and fully optimize where the right amount of workforce is needed across any project location.

‍This can drastically reduce spending by cutting downtime. The famous phrase “time is money” still holds to this day. Moreover, stacking unwanted workforce in a zone can be unsafe and cause serious incidents due to congestion and overlapping trades.

The workforce data collected from the “Need More”  feature provides very valuable insights into historical records of the optimal workforce and predicts accurately future schedules.

This data is even more valuable when shared across multiple projects, a project leader can simply look at the history and see how many carpenters or crane drivers were needed, helping reduce the time to do the math.

Gaining digital transparency between jobsites, workforce, & materials

The Kwant (OnTarget) App available on the App Store & Google Play. Need More’ feature only available on Good Play. Coming soon to iOS.

Key ‘Need More’ highlights:

• Request and share excess - materials
• Request and share excess - workforce
• Track shipments and delays
• Enable fast dispatch of materials for materials with a short lifespan
• Analyze waste by trade, zone, and qty to avoid overproduction

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