5 Tips For Tracking And Monitoring Construction Equipment Usage And Productivity

If you own a fleet of construction equipment or just a handful of front-end loaders, you know how important it is to keep an eye on your machines. There is no quicker way to lose out on a job than not knowing where your machines are that are necessary to perform the job.

By tracking and monitoring your construction equipment via a GPS dashboard, or opting for a CMMS with GPS equipment tracking features, you are giving your project managers the ability to track and schedule your equipment without any hassle, which saves more than time and frustration.

Getting all your machines centralized and tracked in one system allows you to keep maintenance on track, and machinery to be scheduled ahead of time for jobs as the job is bid so that overlaps in the machinery schedule don’t occur, which can cost you a great deal in lost revenue.

Get All Equipment, Motorized And Non-Motorized, On One Dashboard

One of the most important parts of tracking and monitoring construction equipment overall is to get everything on one dashboard. Going to multiple databases, spreadsheets, and handwritten notes is a huge waste of time and resources. Having one dashboard, where all of your equipment can be found for tracking, is the key to efficiently tracking equipment. By getting all of the information on your equipment centralized, you ensure that there’s no hunting and searching when the goal is to locate a particular machine.

When all of your equipment is visible in one master dashboard, you eliminate the need to run multiple programs and databases, and the old routine of hunting for machinery in multiple systems is replaced by the ease of simply searching the dashboard for a specific equipment ID or tag number.

Use Equipment Scheduling Tools

Some of the equipment GPS and CMMS dashboards offer equipment scheduling tools. These are the ultimate in keeping an eye on your revenue, because not only can you see where your equipment is at the moment, you can also see where it is going to be in a week, or on a specific day. The equipment scheduling tools allow you to book specific pieces of equipment out to a specific job for whatever the job duration happens to be.

By utilizing equipment scheduling tools, you can ensure that when a specific machine is needed for a job, it is on site and ready to go when the job starts, and isn’t booked to use on another job until the first has been completed. By showing that piece of equipment as “in use”, it is ensuring that the equipment isn’t double booked, which can cost you jobs over a lack of machinery to complete the job.

Get Location Reports Twice Daily

By getting location reports on your machinery at the beginning and end of the workday, you can stop the yard hunts that can consume time and resources that you simply don’t have to lose. You can narrow the reports down by piece of equipment to assist in finding equipment that isn’t at its’ last reported location, and stop utilizing manpower to hunt down equipment that is now easily located.

Get Diagnostic Reports

The ability to check on fuel levels, battery life, and hours of use on your equipment without physically having to touch each piece of equipment is the ultimate detail in tracking equipment. No longer do you need to send a yardman around every day to get the diagnostic data on your equipment, because the information is all included in a report that you can pull as the need arises. This also eases a great deal of the maintenance preparation time, because you can be notified as the machinery nears a designated number of hours that signify it is time to perform service on the equipment.

Remote monitoring not only reduces the need for manpower to physically locate and check the equipment’s health, but it also ensures that you can keep your equipment on a PM cycle without needless trips out to the job site to check the machine hours in between service dates. Also, it makes it a great deal simpler to identify equipment health issues like excessive oil use or fluid loss, because the machine health reports can reflect the data across a specific set of dates to show how quickly the health of a machine is deteriorating.

Avoid Equipment Downtime

Equipment downtime costs you money. If a piece of equipment isn’t on a job making money, it is idle and costing money to own and maintain. The point of having heavy equipment fleets is to keep the machinery on a job site and earning, and because of the expenses that are associated with owning heavy equipment, you want to avoid downtime as much as is feasible.

By tracking your equipment usage and productivity through a CMMS, you can keep up with the health and schedule of all of your machinery in user friendly dashboards that also feature wireless capability so that mechanics and project managers can upload real time information from the field, keeping all of your information accurate and all of your machinery ready to roll to the jobsite at a moments notice.

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Talmage Wagstaff.

Co-Founder and CEO of Redlist. Raised in a construction environment, Talmage has been involved in heavy equipment since he was a toddler. He has degrees and extensive experience in civil, mechanical and industrial engineering. Talmage worked for several years as a field engineer with ExxonMobil servicing many of the largest industrial production facilities in the Country.