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Before you begin tracking machines, you will need the hardware. Several manufacturers, like Caterpillar, Komtasu,
Hitachi, John Deere and JLG, now offer their own fleet management tracking systems with hardware installed as standard or optional equipment. While these systems are integrated into the machines by the manufacturer, they can also be installed in some older machines (minus a few features). However, there are a host of offerings from independent providers and you need to find the best system that fits your fleet.
“We work with a lot of smaller, family-owned businesses, but even up through worldwide companies, at the end of the day, it comes down to how much money is going into their pockets,” Massey says. “Asset management helps tell you how much a piece of machinery is costing you to operate and where your bottom line is.”
 Imagine an omniscient, bird’s-eye view of your operations. Every machine is highlighted at its location and you know what it’s doing. It’s like a virtual chess game and you’re surveying your pieces, strategically placing them for optimum performance. Knowledge is power, and now that knowledge is at your fingertips, which are on your computer’s keyboard, tracking the position of each piece of equipment in your operations.
“Location of machines is very important. If you have a couple groups of machines, you are able to know where everything is, which is important when you have half a million [dollars] in assets,” says Tony Nicoletti, director of North American sales for DPL America. “You can see where it is but you can also see how much the asset is running. Maybe an operator is fudging numbers and the machine isn’t really running as much as it’s reported. You can take it and move it to a different jobsite.
“For example, we have one customer that if he finds a piece of equipment that is utilized under a certain percentage, he moves it to another job. That saves him from having to rent another piece of equipment. If you set up daily, weekly and monthly reports, you’ll start to see trends. You can find out if you have too many dozers, if you find two that are operating consistently at 10 to 20 percent. Then you can either sell and rent as needed to maximize your asset usage.”
While making sure that equipment is properly and efficiently utilized, there are a few less obvious benefits of knowing where your machines are and what they are doing. The first is time card comparisons. You’ll know the exact hours a piece of machinery worked — its digging and load/carry cycle times, engine idle and machine shutdown. At times, machine operators work long, laborious hours and toward the end of the week, it can be difficult to break those hours down. If there is ever a discrepancy of hours worked, the fleet management system has tracked and logged it.
“By knowing where your equipment is and what it’s doing you can avoid downtime and other things like equipment hoarding,” says Massey. “Project managers are paid on the speed they finish the job, not the profitability, so they horde the machines to make sure there’s no downtime on their project, but oftentimes machines are just sitting around.”
Geofencing, or geozones, is another popular location-driven feature that many GPS fleet management systems offer. No, it’s not some space-age style sword play, but the ability to set up invisible “fences” through the GPS system that confines your equipment. Using the fleet management system’s software (either hard disk-installed or Web-based), a square or circle, depending on the system, perimeter will be set and alerts will be sent when the equipment leaves that defined area.
Security is obviously the first use of geofencing. If a machine is leaving its focus area and isn’t supposed to, there might be a theft. But there is more to geofencing than thwarting wayward thieves.
“Geofencing allows a user to monitor when equipment is on or off the job. This in turn, allows for analysis of material deliveries, routes and utilization of equipment on the job accurately,” says Steve McGough, COO of HCSS, a construction software solutions company out of Houston. “Using cycle-time alerts, it also allows a user to monitor how efficiently a material order is running and if a truck is getting backed up at a jobsite or plant.”
You can also set geofences to keep things out, as opposed to keeping them in. Want to see if your crews are cutting out early? Put a geofence around the local watering hole to see if any of your trucks stop off.
At the end of a job, you can check the detailed data of how your fleet and machines performed to give you a better idea of how they will perform in the future. That will allow you to make more accurate and confident bid estimates. When a fleet management system is first implemented, it can be difficult to see the return on the investment. The post-job overview can provide a data representation of how your fleet has become more efficient and profitable.
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