CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- These days it's hard to find a product, or even a methodology, that isn't touted as a solution that saves time and boosts productivity. Finding tangible evidence of such claims, on the other hand, sometimes seems like an unproductive waste of time.

That's why research projects such as Leveraging Technology to Improve Construction Productivity, an effort jointly sponsored by FIATECH and the Construction Industry Institute, are so valuable. In this two-year study, Carlos Caldas looked at how automated materials tracking affected productivity at two large job sites -- a 565-megawatt coal plant in Rockdale, Texas and a 550-megawatt gas plant in Toronto.

Caldas, an assistant professor of construction engineering and project management at the University of Texas at Austin, offered a summary of his study at the 2008 FIATECH Member's Meeting. In a nutshell, the news was promising.

At the Texas plant, Bechtel was building two identical boilers, each with its own 25-acre lay-down yard. The crew building Boiler A manually collected 400 particular steel components from the lay-down yard. The Boiler B crew used RFID tagging, a GPS device and other localization technology to create maps indicating where to find the 400 steel components.

Over three months (August to October 2007), the average time spent locating steel components for Boiler A was roughly 36 minutes 48 seconds; moreover, nearly 10% of those components were not immediately found, Caldas said. For Boiler B, the average time was roughly 4 minutes 36 seconds, and only about 0.5% of components were not immediately found, he said. With more than half an hour saved per component, the total time savings for all 400 components would be nearly 215 hours.

At the Toronto plant, meanwhile, Caldas' team tracked 224 pipe spools, 22 safety valves and 100 globe valves. The crew looking for these components manually could not immediately locate three pipe spools; two workers spent five hours searching for them, to no avail, and the contractor, SNC Lavalin, had to spend $5,000 to replace them, Caldas said. The crew using an automated process lost no components and was so efficient that the crew size was reduced from 18 to 12, he said.

In his FIATECH talk, Caldas cited CII research that had looked at the last 25 years of the construction industry and had determined that implementing technology could boost a contractor's productivity between 0.2% and 1.5% annually, depending on the type of construction. (This compared to, among other advancements, a 1.5% annual productivity boost for additional power, say from bigger backhoes, or a 0.5% annual productivity boost for more advanced modules in concrete.)

What, then, can we conclude from Caldas' study? Clearly, locating parts quickly boosts productivity and, thus, lowers costs. And while there is a start-up cost associated with automated materials tracking -- about $5,000 for an RFID reader and about $15 for RFID tags, plus the cost of a GPS device, Caldas said -- there is going to be a start-up cost for buying a bigger backhoe or investing in new concrete modules, too. Technology, whether in the form of new software, digitizer devices or RFID tagging, should play a prominent part in your productivity plan -- and your business plan.

(Editor's note: This is the fifth in an occasional series on the ways that the construction industry can benefit from technology implementations. Previous posts in this series focused on digital photography, video conferencing, integrated systems and not getting left behind.)