DESIGN OF A MOBILE APPLICATION FOR REAL-TIME MONITORING OF CONSTRUCTION PROJECT PROGRESS, MATERIALS, AND MANPOWER

Abstract

Construction project monitoring among small and medium-sized Philippine contractors still relies largely on paper forms, spreadsheets, and verbal, e-mail, or telephone reporting. These practices delay reports, produce inconsistent records, and limit access to current project information. This development-oriented capstone examined existing monitoring practices and their challenges, derived requirements for a mobile application that integrates project progress, materials, and manpower records, documented the design of that application (ConstructTrack, Version 1.3), and set out the evidence needed to evaluate its functional correctness, usability, update accuracy, timeliness, and reliability. A development-oriented, descriptive design was used. A purposive sample of 20 participants (five civil engineers, five site supervisors, five project managers, and five construction workers or foremen, each with at least two years of experience) from the study setting in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, completed a structured questionnaire with closed-ended five-point items and open-ended questions between July 3 and 17, 2026. Application documentation (Version 1.3 role manuals and project metadata) was reviewed and classified as documented, proposed, or independently verified. Responses were summarized with means, standard deviations, and frequencies. Measurement procedures for physical progress, material balances, and labor-hours, a reproducible test plan, and a case-demonstration framework (Barangay Alijis, Bacolod City, September 12–18, 2026) were specified. Respondents reported tracking progress with spreadsheets (75% agreement), recording material usage manually on paper (85%), logging manpower attendance through verbal reports (60%), and sharing data by e-mail or telephone (70%). They agreed that delayed reporting (90%), inaccurate material tracking (80%), communication gaps (85%), and lack of real-time data access (95%) were problems. Timely data updates (100% agreement; M = 4.8) and integrated monitoring of progress, materials, and manpower (95%; M = 4.6) were the most strongly preferred features. Reported post-test mean ratings were 4.3 for ease of navigation, 4.5 for perceived accuracy of updates, and 4.4 for overall satisfaction, with a mean task time of 8.2 minutes. Because individual responses, test conditions, completion logs, and reference-value comparisons have not yet been reconciled with these summaries, the post-test outcomes are provisional. The documentation describes five application roles and the principal modules; functional operation remains unverified. The reported needs support development of an integrated monitoring prototype. Claims about measured performance and project-level effectiveness require documented verification, for which this manuscript specifies the metrics, procedures, and evidence.