How modern asset tracking can make your job site more efficient
Asset tracking is the practice of managing, tracking and reporting on physical assets such as vehicles, trailers, shipping containers and construction equipment.
Traditionally, businesses have relied on manual methods to keep track of their high-value assets, including walking around premises to locate assets when needed and manually logging into Excel spreadsheets. With an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled asset tracking and fleet management system, you can streamline this time-consuming process and make asset and fleet management significantly easier and more effective.
The latest technology allows for a range of tracking hardware and software to be integrated with your assets, feeding information through to a centralised platform that you can view anywhere on any device via the internet for real-time reporting and analysis.
Why is asset tracking so valuable on work sites?
Data, data, data! IoT's ability to capture an incredible volume of data from your assets unlocks a range of workplace efficiencies.
Tracking and collecting data provides you with the information needed to monitor asset utilisation and output in order to improve your productivity. With accurate data, including location data, predictive insights and real-time alerts for specific triggers, management can make decisions based on facts rather than opinions, gut feel, or rough estimates - taking assumptions out of the equation.
What data should you be looking at?
IoT asset tracking can reveal an extraordinary amount of information about your business, but which data points are most important to your business and what data should you be tracking?
Below, we cover the 3 key areas of fleet and asset data you should be capturing to improve your business' efficiency and productivity on any job site.
1. Cost and productivity
Understanding the financials is critical to managing assets effectively and achieving the best return on your capital investment. For example, accurate data gives you insights into what asset-related costs your business can reduce or remove.
Areas to focus on may include:
- Asset theft or loss
- Asset repair times
- Asset life and maintenance
- Fuel usage and rebates
- Asses assets idle time
2. Safety and compliance
Used correctly, an asset tracking and fleet management solution can reduce the risk of accidents, which makes job sites and being on the road much safer for everyone.
The following metrics can help ensure you're meeting your compliance obligations and are following the correct safety procedures:
- Number of unsafe driving incidents
- Real-time fatigue and distraction monitoring
- Measure of safe driving practices
- Monitor use of safety procedures
- Monitoring asset health and maintenance requirements
- Training drivers and their performance over time
- Pre-start checklist and maintenance report completion
3. Performance and utilisation
Understanding asset performance helps identify inefficiencies, which help with long-term planning and decision-making regarding asset purchases. A focus on output and utilisation can help you understand your current capacity and if you have the right size fleet to produce the required output without retaining un-utilised assets.
Areas of interest might be:
- Asset utilisation
- Productive time vs idle time
- Reasons for underperformance
- Finding the assets that are underperforming and identifying the reason why
Why is tracking so important?
To put it simply, asset tracking collects data, and data is good for business. With more visibility over the performance and utilisation of your assets, you can make data-driven decisions that help improve asset utilisation, reduce costs and increase output on your job sites.
Additionally, a robust asset tracking and fleet management solution can help you eliminate lost or stolen assets, saving time searching for them and processing insurance claims, and ensure that you are meeting your safety and compliance and Chain of Responsibility requirements through integrated checklists, operator safety monitoring and asset health monitoring.
Not sure where to get started?
Does your business have room to improve on the way it manages its assets? Among many other benefits, asset tracking has the potential to increase the efficiency of your job site significantly.
Contact our team below to learn more about Connect and our asset tracking solutions.