CIB Software: Optimizing the Building Materials Industry with Cutting-Edge Solutions
The Computer Institut Bamberg (CIB) has been developing software for the construction materials industry for more than 30 years. At bauma 2016, the company is presenting a mobile version of its tried-and-tested software to meet the needs of the industry. With a mobile connection, errors can be detected and rectified more quickly.
Software for the building materials industry, ready-mix concrete and rubble asphalt
CIB, the Computer Institut Bamberg, is a medium-sized company with currently 14 employees. We entered the market in 1985 and started developing software for the building materials industry, ready-mixed concrete and rubble asphalt in 1986. That is why we are at Bauma, the world's largest construction machinery trade fair, which takes place every three years and represents our target group one hundred percent. CIB Mobil is the new addition to our CIB family. We have a lot of customers who work locally in their networks, we have recreated the whole thing here with a dispatching system, i.e. a mixing plant dispatches concrete and there was more and more demand for how to get this data onto mobile devices, which nowadays everyone carries around in their car or in their pocket like a tablet or smartphone. You have to imagine this concrete market a little bit. You have truck mixers that hold 6-8 cubic meters of concrete, you're building a large underground car park, you might have a floor slab of 100 cubic meters to make and you're now interested in ensuring that it runs smoothly. The material has to be delivered relatively evenly. This means you have 10 to 12 to 20 trips to make, depending on the size of the project, and something can always go wrong in this process. This means that the players, the site manager or the plant manager always want to know if everything is going well. That's good, but if something doesn't work out, they want to know as soon as possible. And it is precisely this need, which is very strong, that we want to take into account.
Workplace of a mixing foreman dispatcher in a ready-mix concrete plant
What we have set up here as an example is the typical workplace of a mixing foreman dispatcher in a ready-mix concrete plant. We see that a construction site, the garage for Mr. Müller is to be scheduled - this is the classic mixing foreman scheduling business as our customers know and operate it. The mixing foreman planner will now plan a certain quantity of a certain concrete and the order is scheduled. This is the classic local business. Then there is the interaction between the scheduling department. This tour has to be transferred to a mixing plant, which is equipment that we don't build, but there are a dozen manufacturers in Germany that we control, where the entire concrete is then finished. We then receive a delivery bill and forward it to the commercial system.
Simple scheduling for the control of mixing systems
This is the basic run that is done here. Which is displayed by a dispatcher - now also from the screen. He always sees the tours via his graphics. Each of these bars has a meaning, each color is a certain status of a tour, for example green means it is driving to the construction site, brown means it is being loaded. This means that the order has already been transferred to the mixing plant. The control system of the mixing plant will now start mixing. The delivery bill data record is then reported back to us and the cross-reference is then made to the CIB Mobile. This means that when I look at my plant overview with a mobile device, I can see that the third plant has started up, it's about time, we're already past ten and as a plant manager on the road I can see that everything is fine on Monday morning, I'm happy. Or, conversely, I find that something is going wrong at some point. Then I can deal with it immediately. And of course I can also do it on small devices, so it doesn't matter where I have it. In principle, our customers could already have the system, but we want to use Bauma to find out which views, which special filters, which search criteria our customers would like to have, so that we can make further adjustments during or after the trade fair - which, by the way, is always the case anyway, we are in constant contact with our customers - always trying to do what the market would like, what the users would like, what the plant manager or mixing foreman would like.
