“Asset Tracking” is a common term used by many contractors looking to track the location of their different asset types. Lost and misplaced assets are a real industry problem but it’s only one piece of the overall operational puzzle and only one of many opportunities to recoup unnecessary spending on assets and on people hours.
Owning and managing a mixed fleet of assets is complex, and it goes way beyond each asset’s physical location. That’s why it’s imperative that when considering an equipment tracking system for your business, you should be thinking about a more comprehensive equipment management solution that is focused on the whole operational picture; not just tracking.
Think about the ways you can make your operations and the people across your entire team more efficient. Saving money on fuel and unnecessary rentals, increasing utilization, reducing maintenance headaches and safety issues, streamlining dispatching and more are all solutions your business should be looking for that go deeper beyond tracking.
We’ll cut right to the chase. Here are our top reasons how construction-specific, operations-focused equipment management systems bring value to construction businesses.
Equipment management systems bring value in the field, shop and office and connect these roles that typically work in silos. They bring value to different members of your team across the many different roles in a construction business. They provide value for everyone, and their effects permeate throughout the business, connecting those roles that were traditionally stuck on islands.
This section goes deep into their value around the following:
At the most basic and foundational level, equipment fleet management saves your people time. Time is a valuable commodity and non-renewable resource.
How does equipment management save time? It saves people time in the field, in the office and on the go by letting you quickly access needed information that would normally require extra hours searching for. Calling someone up for information? Trust us, it will be quicker to access it yourself in your equipment management app than calling your co-worker, calling him back when he doesn’t answer, leaving a voicemail, missing his return call, catching up to shoot the breeze, waiting for him to retrieve your data, getting it back, requiring edits, and so on. Why spend the extra time? An asset management system will pay for itself ten-fold if its saving time for your personnel every day.
Equipment fleet management systems help personnel get work done faster when not spending time on gathering intel from multiple sources in multiple formats.
Bonus win: reducing stress caused by time constraints inherently leads to better workplace satisfaction and performance. When you implement a solution that makes the day to day lives of your employees easier, they will perform better and ultimately be more productive. This is a benefit for them that translates to a benefit for overall business success.
In today’s challenging construction labor market, this is more important than ever. Employees want to work for a company that is performing well and has tools in place that will make their days easier, safer and ultimately more fulfilling. Operational efficiencies resulting from equipment management systems (across the many roles and levels these systems impact) lead to an easier workday, happier staff and more productive workdays.
This applies to folks in the field, as well as in the shop and the office. Reducing manual processes through automation and having confidence (vs. confusion) that they are working with accurate data helps save time and facilitates better decision making at all levels of the organization.
It would be remiss not to touch on some of the challenges around adopting a new system, as behaviors are often hard to change, but when your team realizes the value that an asset management system has on their days directly, it improves buy-in and overall adoption. This leads to operational improvements, and growth to the bottom line.
Saving time and increasing productivity are valuable efficiencies that lead to a positive ROI on your investment in equipment management technology and result in overall increased profitability. But before it trickles that far, there are some more immediate cost saving benefits to consider.
Let’s consider a real money example.
For the cost of a field engineer’s annual salary, you purchase an equipment management system with features and functionality that will save you tenfold in multiple areas of your operations that benefits multiple teams.
For what it would cost you to replace the undercarriage of an excavator, you’ve purchased hardware that feeds into a system allowing you to accurately capture the hours or miles of all your assets on wheels or with engines. Think about how much it costs you to have multiple field engineers running around your jobsites manually logging equipment hours, manually entering that info into a spreadsheet, running reports with potentially faulty and already outdated data, etc.
Add up all those man-hours for all your field engineers across all your jobsites. To implement an equipment management system to automate that process for the cost of just one of those employees, you’ve freed up that many man hours across the existing staff to put towards other focuses, allowing you to gain massive productivity elsewhere.
At the end of the day, using an equipment management system to save immediate costs and ultimately reduce your total cost of ownership is immensely valuable for putting money back into your balance sheet to reinvest in your business.
Technology is changing the way your competition does business. By now, you can guarantee that your competitors are beginning to leverage at least basic forms of the construction technology options available in today’s industry.
In fact, according to a survey and corresponding study published by Autodesk in late 2021, more than 80% of respondents reported an increase in the project data their organizations are creating from construction technology over the past three years. Almost half experienced more than a 50% increase. This suggests that businesses are increasingly adopting and leveraging technology in their day-to-day operations. According to a 2022 Procore ROI Report, Construction technology investor funding reached a record $2.1 billion in 2021––more than a 100% increase from a year ago, which indicates that construction technology is here to stay. Use of construction technology for operations is a trend contractors will want to become familiar with.
Yet another area of value when you adopt an equipment management system, specifically, as an operational tool that goes beyond tracking is that it keeps you current and gives you a leg up on the other contractors who onboarded a simple telematics system and think they are set.
From the field level and up, project and operational efficiencies through total equipment management leads to enterprise efficiencies as those benefits trickle up to the corporate level which then leads to winning future work with more accurate rates and improved safety records, and ultimately results in higher profitability on those projects.
When you leverage an equipment management system that monitors utilization, you have a better basis to build more accurate billing rates, ultimately leading to more informed bid rates that you submit to win future work. When you know what it really costs you to build a job, you can be more competitive at bid time and become more profitable in the execution of those jobs after mobilizing and breaking ground.
When using an equipment management system to bolster your operations, you can efficiently:
The cycle repeats. All these operational efficiencies repeat to continue to aid in winning and executing work for ongoing business growth and success.
Some quick value highlights that different features within an equipment management system can bring to your business and operations include:
Look for a total equipment management solution that is construction focused and goes far beyond simple telematics. Look for a system that leverages that tracking data for multiple other purposes and provides construction-focused solutions you need to other operational and equipment related challenges your team and your business have.
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. When you purchase a tracking system, you get potentially decent tracking data. However, this is often impacted by unreliable hardware not built for construction environments, and very likely it’s delivered in a data dump that you then need to sort through to understand and work with.
Systems like Tenna can make a big impact on bringing value to your business in terms of time savings, increased productivity, cost savings and efficiencies and overall increased profitability. Other tracking providers may say these things too, but as a construction-focused partner to other contractors, the industry trusts that we do it. This is evidenced by multiple contractor testimonials and reviews, and industry rankings across other tracking providers.
Asset management is becoming a standard practice in today’s modern industry because of the many values it brings as already highlighted. But what about future value? Where can the value of equipment management continue to be seen down the road?
Not only will the existing value of equipment management systems continue to benefit businesses over time for the reasons emphasized earlier, but there are potential areas where it can provide benefits in other ways in the future. For example, we may see:
Deploying a construction technology system for managing your assets brings all of the above benefits to life for your business – are these efficiencies valuable to you?
Asset Tracking is only the start. Don’t just stop there. Thoroughly managing your assets is the means to the end for real value in your business operations and profitability. Tenna takes you beyond tracking. Contact us today to reap the benefits.