Construction companies manage a multitude of moving parts and high-stake projects. Moreover, they rely on the availability of critical heavy equipment such as tractors, excavators, diggers, and bulldozers to carry out jobs.
But what happens if you lose track of these high-value equipment? Entire projects could face major setbacks.
Losing heavy equipment is a nightmare for construction companies. When machines don’t make it to the job site, tasks come to a halt and projects ultimately get delayed. This damages the overall health of a business and hampers long-term growth.
Unsurprisingly so, the unavailability and breakdown of equipment has been ranked as one of the five main causes of project delays in the construction industry.
With businesses all over the world moving to technology to solve everyday problems, an effective way to deal with equipment mismanagement is by migrating to equipment tracking software. Such solutions help automate projects and optimize equipment tracking.
Furthermore, they enable companies to plan equipment maintenance sessions in advance. This helps avoid last-minute breakdowns and increase equipment up-time. Automating maintenance workflow processes also greatly helps save time.
Equipment tracking lets you keep tabs on everything pertaining to heavy equipment so your company can tap into its complete potential.
Here we discuss some ways for you to avoid project delays using heavy equipment tracking software.
1. Efficiently track depreciation
Construction companies own hundreds of equipment, from diggers to cranes and more. These assets are constantly on the move. They go from the main warehouse to hundreds of job sites and then to the hands of over 200 employees every year.
With all this usage over time and mounting maintenance costs, equipment value is bound to depreciate. To study the depreciation of your equipment, equipment tracking software comes saddled with depreciation tracking.
This information will help you make better decisions about either continuing to use a piece of equipment or replacing it instead.
In addition, it will also record other important data about how the company should use the equipment moving forward.
Read more: How CMMS Helps Construction Enterprises Increase Profits
2. Never run out of stock
There are many small tools in construction companies that are checked out in bulk, such as nuts and bolts. Knowing how many of these you have in stock can save you from losing time in the future.
Moreover, imagine that you have a busy workday ahead of you. You aim to get a substantial amount of work done today. You need to build a shed and need to check out a large number of nails and screws.
However, at the last minute, you see that the company doesn’t have enough of those in stock. There goes the entire workday you had planned!
The shortage of stock potentially delays the project, even though it might seem like a small setback at the time.
This is a very simple example to help you understand that there are several such cases in which a shortage of stock can cause serious problems.
In such cases, receiving low stock alerts so you know when to order new stock is extremely useful.
With heavy equipment tracking software, you can easily schedule such alerts to be sent whenever a particular asset reaches a lower threshold limit. What counts as the lower threshold limit is something you can decide and set according to your needs.
3. Consistent maintenance routines
Managing heavy machinery also includes maintaining the machinery. However, most construction companies don’t keep track of the maintenance needs of their equipment.
In fact, most only send equipment out for maintenance once it breaks down. This is known as reactive maintenance. Instead, the more efficient alternative is to shift to preventive maintenance.
In preventive maintenance, you schedule maintenance services periodically in advance so the equipment remains functioning, instead of waiting for it to break down. With such maintenance, you can avoid costly downtime and reduce repair costs.
A heavy equipment tracking system can help you shift from reactive and costly maintenance to preventive maintenance. You can use the system to automate the maintenance process.
Simply schedule maintenance alerts to be sent out periodically to the relevant personnel.
In addition, the equipment in question will also be made unavailable to the users, so that no one has the option of checking it out.
This way, all your equipment will remain in ideal condition, and breakdowns will decrease.
As a result of fewer breakdowns, the equipment availability will also increase. This eventually leads to an increase in equipment life and a decrease in employee downtime.
4. Lose heavy equipment no more
Losing tools obviously comes with its own set of problems, such as a decrease in productivity because of tool unavailability. Then there are also costs you have to incur to replace the tool.
You probably wish you could just track the tool to know where it disappeared to. That is exactly what you can do with equipment tracking software.
In reality, many company equipment often just go missing. Instead of replacing them, use tracking software to find the missing tool.
The first thing you’d want to know is “Who was the last person to check the equipment out?”. You can easily generate a history report for this purpose. The report shows you the history of all check-ins and checkouts of that particular equipment. This makes it easy for you to know who last checked out the equipment and who to question about its disappearance.
In addition to this, you can also conduct an audit to see the total number of assets that are missing. Once you run an audit, every user who currently has custody of an asset will have to scan the asset.
Scanning the equipment verifies that the asset is in the custody of a user. This helps confirm that the equipment is not lost. So audits provide you with conclusive evidence that the equipment is physically present.
Usually, companies use audits more frequently during stock-taking activities.
No more project delays!
Heavy equipment tracking software can do away with myriads of problems you might be facing in your company.
From tracking depreciation to preventive maintenance of your equipment, tracking software helps simplify processes and save time.
You might remember that before we mentioned how equipment unavailability leads to project delays. This won’t be a problem anymore, with tracking software increasing equipment availability as well.
All this makes for a more productive workday and a decrease in equipment replacement costs as well. In short, equipment tracking technology paves the way for faster and smoother execution of construction projects.
About EZOfficeInventory!
EZOfficeInventory is the leading construction equipment tracking software. It allows you to track, maintain and report on equipment from anywhere, at any time.
