McGee Group is one of Europe's leading and most trusted Civil, Structural and Demolition engineering contractors. Established over 50 years, the London based group have been awarded many major, national projects and pride themselves on being innovators in the civil engineering and demolition sectors.
To combat the mountain of paper tickets associated with large scale earthworks projects, McGee has deployed the specialist PODFather Earthworks system to replace traditional paper Conveyance Notes. The initial deployment has been to capture the vehicle and material movements of the civil engineering element of the new Terminal 2 Building at Heathrow Airport.
PODFather Earthworks provides a real-time ticketing system by using rugged Elf™ handhelds from Datalogic and RW420 printers from Zebra. Data accuracy is improved and entry time reduced by using barcode technology to track vehicles, site, and material types within the system.
When a vehicle collects a load from the site, all data is captured on the ELF™ 3.5G and a uniquely barcoded conveyance note is produced instantly from the mobile printer and given to the driver. The tickets have been customized to suit McGee's requirements, with all information displayed to ensure all Duty of Care requirements are met for the transfer of material and waste management.
The driver presents the ticket at the intended tip site, where it's barcode is scanned with another rugged ELF™ PDA, to confirm the movement has been completed. The ticket data is then verified to ensure the material details were accurately entered upon collection.
The tickets are transmitted in real-time to a central ticket database, where they are permanently archived and accessible online by both office and site staff.
A reporting system is included which allows McGee to analyze the data according to site, material types, hauler and vehicle utilization.
In comparison to the paper based processes replaced with the PODFather and ELF™ PDA system, the benefits are huge. Time savings are in the region of 60% less time taken to produce a waste ticket, and a reduction of 25% of site manpower with similar savings in the office for data entry. This, combined with a huge improvement in ticket accuracy, means the real-time reports generated out of the system within minutes of the work being completed on site would have otherwise taken days to produce.
John McGee, Director of McGee Group, comments, "the results of the PODFather Earthworks system are compelling. Heathrow T2B is one of the largest earthworks contract in the history of McGee, so we need to know whatever system we deployed would work. From the first demo of the solution we knew it would suit our needs with little customization, and within 4 weeks we were running live." John continues, "We're very happy with the PODFather and Elf™ solution and would recommend it to anyone looking to automate their waste ticketing processes."
