East Coast Electrical Contractor Boosts Efficiency

One of the East Coast’s largest electrical contractors had a problem at a busy facility where they manufacture modular electrical rooms for data centers. They needed a more efficient method of dispensing PPE, consumables and parts to workers and allocating the costs to the appropriate job. They also sought a way to provide access to these necessities 24/7 without adding additional personnel.

Safety department employees were spending inordinate amounts of time in the equipment distribution room distributing the items and recording who took them. At the end of each month, they had to manually review what items had been taken, allocate the costs to the correct project and place restocking orders. The time they spent took them away from critical tasks such as safety training.

Supplies OnDemand solution

United Rentals provided a fully automated, self-serve inventory management solution called Supplies OnDemand. This flexible solution, which took the form of a shipping container, comes custom stocked with all the necessary supplies, from safety vests to face shields to welding gloves. Workers access the vessel by scanning their ID badge or entering a unique PIN code.

Shelves inside are equipped with weight-measuring sensors. When an item is taken from its dedicated place on the shelf, the change in weight indicates that the item has been removed.

To keep track of who removes which items when multiple workers occupy the container at the same time, a sophisticated camera system in the ceiling tracks and records the movements of each person, including where they reach on a shelf. It can distinguish the movements of as many as eight people simultaneously based on the outline of each person’s body. If one worker enters the container by following behind another person without badging in, all transactions are attributed to the employee who badged in, but the video reveals that two employees performed transactions.

Streamlined job cost allocations

Before exiting the container, workers use a touchscreen to enter the job cost code for each item they took, which minimizes the need for manual job cost allocation. After each transaction, workers and their supervisors receive an emailed receipt with the name of the worker, the items removed, and the quantity.

United Rentals established a hierarchy of receipts so each supervisor has visibility into all transactions conducted by their own team members. Supervisors can also generate reports that allow them to monitor spending on different projects using different date ranges.

More efficient inventory management

Thanks to order detail reports, managers know how many of each item were removed and therefore how many are left. From these reports they can determine restocking needs. To further streamline inventory management, United Rentals created low-inventory alerts and programmed them to be sent directly to the vendor. The contractor provided the vendor its own PIN for accessing the container. The shelves detect the new inventory based on weight. The vendor and the contractor then receive an emailed restocking receipt.

Versatile enough for any jobsite

Companies can make the Supplies OnDemand solution available to their workers 24/7, an important consideration when crews work overnight shifts. Another advantage over staffed distribution rooms: “It doesn’t take vacation and it doesn’t call in sick,” said Steven Anderson, United Rentals region product development manager for asset tracking systems. 

Any space with a locking door can be retrofitted with this technology, including a trailer, a container, a room inside a building and even a warehouse.

Thanks to the Supplies OnDemand, safety personnel have been able to devote more of their time to the work they were hired to do. The solution has reduced labor costs and realized a time savings of at least 30%.

“The customer told me that this is exactly the type of technology they need to drive their corporate goals. They want it in all their parts rooms,” said Anderson. As a result of the highly successful pilot, they plan to deploy the solution to more of their jobsites.