Get FinancingTelematics Make Your Equipment Work Smarter
With the ELD (Electronic Logging Device) mandate now in effect for commercial vehicles (including heavy construction equipment), electronic monitoring and telematics technology is more important than ever before to your operation. Fortunately, modern telematics can bring a lot more to the table than just ELD compliance. To start, telematics can be used to help prevent unauthorized use and theft of heavy equipment—a big bonus for any rental company. Telematics tied to engine and critical components can also warn you when problems arise or if the equipment is being unsafely operated.
What Are Telematics?
Put simply, telematics is the collection and storage or transmission of many kinds of data about equipment. Information from diagnostic sensors, built-in scales, GPS tracking, and other metrics can be captured by a machine. And typically, this information is wirelessly transmitted to allow managers and owners to remotely analyze and make use of the data. Generally, telematics data can be viewed on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. Common telematics data points in construction equipment include engine hours (work and idle), error code alerts, location, and fuel consumption.
Maintenance & Problem Prevention
When combined with telematics software, equipment data can be used to maximize machine health and minimize downtime. For example, it’s easy to schedule maintenance based on engine and operating hours or other key metrics to improve uptime. Automated documentation of operating data can also be helpful when you resell a piece of equipment, as buyers can be sure of its current condition and operational history.
When it comes to machine health, engine telematics can help to point out when and where operators might be pushing equipment too hard. In addition to avoiding extra wear and tear, error codes and alerts can improve operator safety. Service alerts sent out to both owners and operators can help to avoid costly downtime, if problems are caught in time. On the flip side, equipment with engine and load telematics can also report if equipment is running well under capacity.
GPS & Theft
The National Equipment Register estimates that up to $400 million in construction equipment is stolen annually in the U.S. Telematics can pair with GPS location to define work zones, and if the equipment leaves the jobsite or other preset location, equipment owners can be alerted. Most telematics solutions also let you create operating hour parameters, so you’ll know if equipment is being used outside of normal work hours. For example, you might receive a text message or email the moment a machine leaves the jobsite or when it’s turned on outside scheduled work hours.
Should theft occur, equipment owners can use GPS location information to recover stolen equipment. GPS location can also come in handy for fleets where equipment regularly shuttles among jobsites, helping to make more efficient use of equipment and spend less time and resources transporting it unnecessarily.
Reduce Usage Costs
Information about fuel usage can help when evaluating fuel costs for a given job or certain tasks. And data about idle or work time can highlight if certain machines are being used too much or too little, so you can optimize fleet distribution and see if you need more (or less) of a certain types of equipment on the lot. Some telematics applications feature built-in analytics that help to identify machine downtime and excess idling.
Identifying idle equipment can also help to find operational inefficiencies. Let’s say that telematics data shows you have a loader that’s constantly working while two other machines wait for it to load materials. You could add a second loader to the worksite and see if you can reduce jobsite idle time—and back up those choices with data from the telematics. GPS data can also be combined with telematics to show where machines are mostly likely to sit idle.
Telematics Benefits For Rentals
Telematics data clearly has some big benefits for owners, and many of the features are just as valuable to equipment rental yards. Equipment errors and other service alerts can help you to head off problems before failure, extend lifetime, and ensure that rental customers receive equipment in top-notch shape. And if you need to repair a machine in the field, telematics data can help to reduce service crew guesswork and help them to bring along the right replacement parts and tools. Telematics also offers new levels of visibility and gives rental companies a way to prove improper use of rented equipment.
Custom All-In-One Or Brand-Specific?
Although many manufacturers offer telematics software to go with the data collected by their equipment, manufacturer software is typically only designed to track the company’s own equipment. Many rental fleets include a wide variety of equipment types from many manufacturers; for such operations, custom telematics software can provide a single place to combine data gathered from various machines from differing brands. When considering or developing custom-made telematics software solutions, you should always make sure the tools you choose can track