Rother Tidal Walls – East implement innovative solution to managing material movement
Our Rother Tidal Walls – East team has successfully created and deployed a mobile app that enables close monitoring of material deliveries to site. With over 200,000 tonnes of material to be delivered under strict planning conditions, controlling material movement is important in maintaining high productivity and ensuring the project's success.
Background
Over the past 18 months, our team at Rother Tidal Walls – East has developed and successfully implemented a lorry movement app. Several members of our team had previously worked on large-scale projects such as Crossrail, Hinkley Point and HS2. Drawing on this experience, the team recognised that effective vehicle delivery management would be crucial in tracking and managing the large volume of deliveries.
What did you do differently?
Often, logistics systems are cumbersome, require extensive training and fail because they are not used correctly, with only a few individuals knowing how to operate them properly. Our digital development team, in conjunction with the Environment Agency, developed a bespoke app with an emphasis on making the front end as simple as possible for consistent, accurate data capture. We ensured that it was accessible to all users, with detailed analytics at the back end. With reliable data in hand, the team could extract a wide range of information live.
The app is designed to ensure the collection of the right data at the right time, providing a live picture of production, legal compliance and invaluable records for performance analysis. The accompanying dashboard enables efficient real-time management in a hybrid and geographically dispersed working environment.
Another key benefit of the app was that it helped reduce the administrative burden of collecting delivery tickets from various access points each day and manually inputting data into a tracker.
Lessons learnt and future uses
The project team has been trialling further developments of the app to work in conjunction with earthworks placement, aiming to create a one-stop-shop system.
"The development of the lorry app, with its simple front end for on-site use and a powerful backend that generates detailed analytics, has been a game changer for Rother Tidal Walls – East. The app has since been adopted by many VolkerStevin projects and adapted to meet their specific needs. For me, the true measure of great innovation is adoption!”
Jack Leedale South East Hub Innovation Lead at VolkerStevin
Benefits
- Time saving: Instantly upload delivery tickets to the cloud, reducing office management time spent manually scanning tickets.
- Programme management:
- Increased programme certainty as output could accurately review and update.
- Provides live updates on the import and export of materials, allowing the team to track daily progress.
- Track material imports against an S-curve, ensuring the project stayed on track. The S-curve was also analysed for potential efficiencies.
- Generates dashboard graphics used in internal and client meetings and reports.
- Compliance: Monitors the number of deliveries through any gate, ensuring and demonstrating compliance with planning restrictions.
- Provides an audit trail of site inductions for delivery drivers.
- Safety, health, environment and well-being (SHEW): Links to tracking and compliance with SHEW Code of Practice DSV compliance checks.
- Carbon savings: Estimated 10% saving of carbon – the carbon spend for transport was reduced from 7,427 tCO2e to 6,685 tCO2e based on optimising and reducing deliveries.
- Cost savings: Saved £30,000 through delivery efficiencies. For example, during the last month of clay delivery, accurate projections of the final volumes required could be made which led to the quarry closing early, not having to wait for “slow” final measures and unproductive final weeks.
