Development of Bulk Material Management System and Research on Material Balance Applications Based on Business Intelligence

Business intelligence and big data analytics have become increasingly important in both academic and business communities over the past decades. Nuclear power projects involve various bulk materials and the quantities are huge. However, bulk material management in design, procurement and construction phases is disjointed to an extent thus often causes inaccurate purchase quantity of bulk materials, mismatching of upstream and downstream business schedules, poor coordination between different business segments and etc. As a result there are usually large quantities of bulk materials left at the end of the project causing huge waste. Therefore, we developed Bulk Material Management System based on the source data of Design Institute. By calculating quantities of materials as per engineering drawings we can not only provide procurement department with accurate purchase quantities for reference, but also provide construction department with amount of materials in certain installation areas. Then we do research on material balance and add time attribute to the demand materials on field and the received materials after purchasing so as to link the material items with the schedule, cost and other factors. On this basis we develop material balance report of demand quantity, received quantity and inventory quantity in order to make business intelligence analysis for procurement planning, inventory warning, etc. and thus lead to a better EPC coordination for cost and profit efficiency of the company.