For contractors, equipment tracking goes beyond tracking heavy machines and on-road fleets. Efficiently managing small equipment, assets, attachments, consumables and tools is just as crucial for maintaining productivity and controlling costs.
While large assets like excavators and trucks are often accounted for with GPS and telematics, miscellaneous assets like generators, surveying tools, equipment attachments, and spare parts can often go overlooked, despite their essential role in daily operations.
Hoarding, misplacement, theft and general lack of visibility are common challenges for all construction businesses. These issues result in cost overruns, project delays, and unplanned downtime. In fact, construction companies lose millions each year to stolen or lost small equipment.
Without a reliable equipment management system to monitor all your assets, contractors find themselves repeatedly replacing or over-renting and driving up expenses over time.
Luckily, there’s a solution for tracking these more diverse asset classes. In this guide, we will look at the critical role BLE (Bluetooth) beacons play in equipment management, the best use cases for BLE asset tracking, and the top solutions for construction businesses.
Why Tracking All Assets Matters in Construction
The construction industry faces significant challenges due to misplaced or stolen equipment. According to the National Equipment Register (NER), equipment theft costs the industry between $300 million and $1 billion annually.
With the rising cost of equipment and materials due to supply chain issues and tariffs as well as the frequent loss or misplacement of high impact items, critical machine parts and attachments, the industry faces a serious challenge: keeping tabs on critical but easily overlooked support assets to avoid unnecessary repurchases.
Common challenges construction businesses face with hard-to-track tools and support inventory that traditionally fall through the cracks include:
- Loss and Theft: Small tools are particularly vulnerable to being misplaced or stolen due to their size and portability.
- Inefficient Utilization: Without proper tracking, assets may be underutilized, hoarded, or lost entirely, leading to unnecessary purchases or rentals. This is especially true with bulky and hard-to-move assets such as trench shoring boxes and concrete forms.
- Administrative Burden: Manually tracking equipment can be time-consuming and prone to errors, diverting valuable resources from core construction activities.
Implementing tracking solutions can mitigate these losses by maintaining location visibility, improving accountability, streamlining scheduling and dispatching, and enhancing overall site efficiency.
Types of Asset Tracking Devices
Various technologies are employed to track construction assets, including:
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons: Proximity-based tracking using Bluetooth technology to see location, detected by compatible Bluetooth readers, and a reliable, cost-effective solution for miscellaneous assets of all shapes and sizes without engines.
GPS Trackers Uses cellular data to locate and track assets in real time and often plug into onboard diagnostic ports for usage, hours, maintenance and other data collection. GPS is not typically the most cost-effective method for monitoring smaller, miscellaneous assets.
What are BLE Beacons?
BLE beacons are small, wireless transmitters that use Bluetooth Low Energy technology to broadcast signals to nearby devices. These beacons have gained popularity in various industries, including construction, for their ability to facilitate efficient asset tracking and management in a low-cost way.
BLE means Bluetooth Low Energy, which is a wireless communication method that serves short-range data exchange and uses very little power. You are likely very familiar with how BLE technology works in your personal life, whether connecting to a speaker system or AirPods, or connecting your computer with a wireless mouse and keyboard. This same application, through IoT technology, can connect a construction asset with a BLE tracker to a broader construction asset management platform. (More on that below.)
BLE beacons send out signals that compatible devices can detect, which typically includes smartphones and special receivers. These signals help monitor asset locations within a certain range.
BLE beacons provide a flexible solution to track more diverse asset classes.
How BLE Beacons Are Used in Construction
In construction, BLE beacons are affixed to attachments, material inventory, tools and miscellaneous assets, enabling managers to monitor their location and movement within the job site. BLE beacons send signals, called pings, that nearby receivers or mobile devices can pick up.
Tenna’s BLE beacons, for example, transmit signals up to 300 feet, in line-of-sight. These regular heartbeats are picked up by Tenna’s Mobile App for iOS and Android or by the TennaINTEL Equipment Tracker, seamlessly capturing asset location data and feeding it directly into the Tenna platform.
Designed for efficiency, BLE beacons consume minimal power, resulting in extended battery life—often lasting several years without replacement, and are engineered to stand tough against construction environmental factors. This longevity makes them a cost-effective solution for continuous asset tracking in demanding construction environments and in high, aggressive use scenarios.
BLE Beacons vs. Other Equipment Tracking Solutions
BLE beacons offer a unique combination of affordability, efficiency and versatility. So, what are the ideal use cases?
BLE beacons are particularly suited for:
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- Indoor and Outdoor Tracking: Effective in diverse environments where GPS may falter
- Tool and Small Asset Management: Use on hand tools, non-powered assets, surveying tools, lights, instruments and more
- Heavy Equipment Attachment Tracking: Use on buckets, grapples, forks, blades and more
- Construction Material Inventory Tracking: Use on trench boxes, concrete forms, and other structural support assets
Benefits of Using BLE Beacons
Implementing BLE beacons for tracking equipment offers numerous advantages:
- Increased Equipment Visibility on Job Sites: Tracking ensures that all tools and equipment are accounted for, reducing the likelihood of misplacement.
- Enhanced Productivity and Efficiency: Workers spend less time searching for assets they need to use or deploy, allowing more focus on critical tasks.
- Minimized Expenses and Waste: Digitizing the usage and movement of these assets also supports job costing and reduces unnecessary expenses.
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Reduced Loss and Theft: Continuous monitoring deters theft and aids in the swift recovery of stolen items.
Key Features to Look for in BLE Equipment Tracking Devices
When selecting BLE beacons for construction applications, consider the following features:
Durability and Weather Resistance: BLE devices should be able to withstand harsh construction environments in order to fulfill the construction use case. This includes exposure to dust, moisture, extreme temperatures and impact. Tenna’s SP2, for example, can stand direct impact, is rated IP68, providing protection against dirt and water immersion, and is rated IP69k to withstand high pressure and high temperature washdowns of equipment.
Battery Life and Signal Range: Opt for beacons with long battery life and sufficient range to cover your job site effectively. For example, Tenna’s BLE beacons last up to three years, depending on environmental conditions and transmit signals up to 300 feet (line-of-sight), depending on potential obstacles and environmental conditions.
Compatibility with Asset Management Systems: Ensure compatibility with existing asset management platforms for seamless data integration and analysis. Tenna’s BLE beacons enable contractors to consolidate asset tracking and data into a single system.
Why Tenna is the Best Choice for BLE Asset Tracking
Tenna's BLE Beacons offer a robust solution tailored to the construction industry. Designed specifically for real-world construction applications, TennaBLE options provide reliable performance and integrate seamlessly with Tenna's comprehensive asset management system, so contractors can track and manage all of their assets in one place.
Options include:
TennaBLE SP2 – ideal for larger, hard-to-track assets, such as trench boxes, concrete forms, equipment attachments and more
TennaBLE RT1 – ideal for small tools and devices, non-powered assets, surveying tools, lights, instruments and more
TennaBLE Beacon Steel Puck – ideal for equipment attachments such as buckets and boom sections
TennaBLE Beacon Ruggedized – ideal for spare parts, power tools and more
When paired with TennaINTEL, which is used in mid-sized, engine-powered equipment, tracking goes a step further by enabling autonomous location updates for up to 128 beacons at once. This powerful capability allows contractors to monitor multiple small assets alongside a piece of heavy equipment without requiring manual scans or data entry.
Take Control of Your Asset Tracking with BLE Beacons
While easily overlooked supporting assets may not cost as much as heavy machinery, they are just as important for productivity and profit. Losing track of these assets, or not maximizing their use, leads to unnecessary replacements, time-consuming searches, and poor job costing. BLE beacons can help solve these problems.
By leveraging BLE beacon technology, contractors can gain real-time visibility and control over more diverse asset classes. Improved inventory management translates directly into more accurate job costing, better budget control, and ultimately, improved project margins. Every asset accounted for is time and money saved—on replacements, rentals, and wasted labor hours.
Does BLE asset tracking sound like the perfect solution? Check out Tenna's newest, toughest, most unique BLE tracker, the TennaBLE SP2.