Design of smart inventory management system for construction sector based on IoT and cloud computing

Abstract

Monitoring and managing consumption of raw materials and goods in any manufacturing industry is considered a vital activity to operational sustainability and profitability. Given the current state of global competition, manufacturing industries are almost always on the lookout for an inventory management system that would help curtail costs and reduce time required to supply raw materials and goods to carry out production quickly and efficiently. It is, therefore, of paramount importance that continuous improvements are carried out on existing inventory management designs to stay relevant. While modern inventory management systems have benefitted greatly from barcodes, our research reveals that there could be an opportunity to approach barcode-based designs by amalgamating such with Cloud Computing, Arduino-based wireless station nodes, IoT and a secure form channel to access data through a dedicated web portal. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using our model and show how this can help construction sector in managing inventory of essential form work shuttering products. Although, the background of our research is related to Indian construction companies, the results of our study can be extended to other regions as well .

Keywords

• Barcode
• Cloud computing
• Construction industry
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Shuttering technology