October 2023CONSTRUCTIONTECHREVIEW.COM8IN MYOPINIONBy Paul Hardy, Senior ABAP Developer, Hanson AustraliaADVENT OF TECHNOLOGY IN A CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRYI work in Australia for a company that supplies building materials (e.g., concrete/aggregates etc.) to companies that construct roads, buildings, and so on (hereafter "customers").At the start of 2022, my job title was changed from "Programmer" to "Programmer/Integration Specialist". At first, I wondered about that, but it turned out I spent the whole year working on integration projects--linking our ERP system with customers' IT systems.Thus, I would like to revisit the problem such projects are supposed to address, how technology is supposed to solve that problem, and the past, present, and future of such initiatives in the Australian construction industry.A Growing Concern: Manual TypingManually typing the same information into several different computer systems (the customer and supplier systems) wastes time, and there is a very high risk the information will be different in each system.If that information does not match, there will be problems at invoice time, costing both parties (accounts receivable for the supplier and accounts payable for the customer) a vast amount of time and money.Synchronised Information Making the Task EasierTo avoid that problem the following information needs to be synchronised between the two parties: -· Purchase orders in the customer system with sales orders in the supplier system· What happens on site (goods receipt in the customer system/ deliveries in the supplier system)If this happens, both parties win.The nature of the problem never changes, but how to solve it changes over time based on a mixture of the advance of Paul Hardy
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