Material requests on site: from “We need concrete tomorrow” to delivery

A site material request is the process of passing the material needed on site to the office, with its type, quantity and required date, and tracking it until it is received. On site it often starts with a single sentence: “We need concrete for tomorrow morning.” The sentence is complete for the foreman, because he knows which floor he means. For the office, four questions remain open.

In this article we explain how a request should move from a WhatsApp message to a delivery record. We give the examples through SahaSesi AI, and we state clearly what the product does and what it leaves to your purchasing team.

Four pieces of information a request message should contain

• What? The type and grade of the material. “Concrete” is not enough; “C30 concrete” is what purchasing needs.
• How much? Quantity and unit. Something like “20 cubic metres”.
• When? The required date and, if possible, the time of day. Something like “tomorrow morning”.
• Where? Block and floor. It may not be essential to add this to the message, but it determines who waits where at the moment of delivery.

Three different ways of writing the same request show how it changes the office’s work:

• “We need concrete.” The office has to call first: which grade, how much, when?
• “We need concrete tomorrow.” The date is there but the grade and quantity are not; a phone call is still unavoidable.
• “We need 20 cubic metres of C30 concrete for tomorrow morning, Block C, 4th floor.” The office can process it without calling anyone.

It is not realistic to expect the foreman to write all four in every message. What is realistic is for it to be visible when a message falls short. In SahaSesi AI a message that cannot be confidently understood or processed lands in front of the office in the “awaiting review” list; so the missing information is noticed before it turns into phone traffic the next morning.

Five steps from request to delivery

1. The foreman writes or leaves a voice message. For example: “We need 20 cubic metres of C30 concrete for tomorrow morning.” There is no app to install; the WhatsApp he uses every day is enough.
2. The message becomes a request and is read back. The system separates the message out as a material request and replies to the foreman: “Saved: 20 m³ C30 concrete request (tomorrow)”. If it is wrong, the foreman corrects it.
3. The office sees the request in the panel. The request sits among records separated by type, with block and floor information; the office checks it, corrects it if necessary and approves. The request counter on the “Today” screen updates the moment a message is processed, so the office sees how many requests the day started with without waiting for the evening.
4. Purchasing runs its own process. Placing the order, asking for prices and talking to the supplier remain the job of your purchasing team. SahaSesi AI records the request and the delivery.
5. The material arrives and a delivery note photo is sent. When the foreman sends a photo of the delivery note, the delivery record is opened; the request and the delivery sit in the same place, side by side.

Why does the gap between request and delivery cause problems?

When a request is written in a group chat, it stays unclear who placed the order. Two people may order the same material, or nobody may; in the second case the problem is only noticed when the material does not arrive. There is a similar gap on the delivery side: if the delivery note stays on phones or in pockets, comparing “material received” with “material paid for” becomes hard at month end. For time-bound deliveries such as concrete, a single delay means a crew that has to wait and a working day lost. That is why the owner of the request and the proof of delivery should be on record from the very first moment, as far as possible.

A request is a record that is not closed until it is delivered; the delivery note photo documents the closing.

Requests in the evening report

Requests do not get lost at the end of the day; they are summarised together with the day’s other records in the evening report, which is split by site. A sample report summary reads like this: “Today 4 records, 14 person-days, 1 material request.” From this line a manager sees which site is waiting for material and can ask the office “what is the status of that request?” To find the answer there is no need to scroll back through groups; the request sits on its own card in the panel. A side benefit of this arrangement is clearer responsibility: once a request record is opened, the question “who knew about this?” gives way to “who has this request and at which stage is it?”, and the answer to the second question is already in the record.

Requesting by voice message

On a concrete pour day or standing by the scaffolding, the foreman may have neither the time to type nor clean hands. That is why a voice message is the most practical way to make a request: SahaSesi AI converts the voice message to text and processes messages sent one after another by the same person together. In a noisy environment there is still a chance of being misunderstood; the read-back step is there precisely to catch this. If the foreman sees the wrong quantity or grade in the reply “Saved: 20 m³ C30 concrete request (tomorrow)”, he corrects it in one sentence; the office works with the right record without picking up the phone.

If you would like to see the request flow at your site with your own examples, from message to delivery, you can look at the screens on the SahaSesi AI page and request a pilot meeting. Starting with one site and a few foremen is enough to see whether the flow suits you.