Construction fleet management

Today, construction deadlines are tighter than ever. Completing projects on time within specifications requires the efficient use of every business tool, including fleet vehicles and assets. In order to increase productivity, construction companies must be able to closely monitor asset utilization and keep an eye on fleet-related costs and daily operations while helping to keep their employees safe.

Embracing a fleet management solution allows you to keep track of vehicles and assets across multiple construction sites to help prevent equipment theft, proactively maintain your fleet to keep it in optimal condition and enable you to focus on fleet safety. Let’s take a closer look at the ways construction fleet management tools can help promote safety and address issues that cause project delays and lost productivity.

Support driver safety

Fleet vehicles and assets become dangerous when driven or utilized over a certain speed. A fleet manager must be alerted to unsafe driver behavior so workers can be given appropriate training to reduce the company's liability and protect its safety record.

With construction fleet management software, you can receive alerts any time a driver has a speeding or harsh driving event that exceeds a specific threshold you’ve set for your fleet. For fleet managers on the move, these messages can be sent to an iPhone or other connected device. Customizable, user-friendly reports and dashboards allow you to easily see summarized safety-related data, including a real-time view of the location and activities of all vehicles and assets and the people operating them.

Help improve vehicle maintenance

Fleet management systems can also help improve oversight of construction-vehicle and heavy-equipment maintenance. By ensuring that scheduled preventative maintenance is performed on time, you can help mitigate the risk of breakdowns or mechanical failures that can endanger workers, while potentially extending the life of your fleet vehicles and improving operational efficiency.

You can also take advantage of verified paperless inspections to help keep all your assets in optimal condition, boost safety and reduce downtime, which in turn helps keep your fleet as productive as possible.

Amplify vehicle and asset security

As a construction business, you invest significant dollars to purchase or lease a range of heavy equipment, vehicles and other assets. One stolen loader can set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars, with only a marginal chance of it being recovered.

With telematics solutions in place, you can help to reduce theft and increase the chances for recovery with notifications when a piece of equipment is operated during an unauthorized time period, activated off-hours, or moved when it’s not on. You can also get near real-time notifications if assets are taken outside of a specified geofenced area; this enables you to locate assets and assist in theft recovery using breadcrumb tracking.

Reduce costs and improve bidding

Completing jobs on time and under budget is critical for any construction company. By monitoring asset information such as engine hours, idling, employee usage and maintenance schedules, construction fleet management makes it possible to reduce or eliminate unnecessary labor and fuel costs that eat away at margins.

Likewise, construction equipment telematics tracking and performance data can be pulled from the asset tracking system into your bidding system to build more accurate budgets and realistic bids.

In addition, you can:

• Get a more accurate view of rental usage during work hours and overtime
• Track actual asset usage by project to improve job-site cost analysis and create more competitive bids for future projects
• Improve the accuracy and efficiency of customer billing if you rent out equipment

Optimize asset utilization

Construction companies can have hundreds to thousands of resources to track, and a good number are likely being used for multiple jobs at the same time. How can you get a better sense of which assets are being used, at what location and in what way? And how can you see whether they’re operating at optimal productivity or whether your team is overlooking available owned assets in favor of rentals?

Construction fleet management technology can help you:

• Know when specific assets are in use and determine how they’re being utilized
• Gain a comprehensive view of all data to help improve equipment utilization
• Learn which resources are being used, and how often, across various geographic locations
• Make more-informed decisions around whether to rent additional resources or simply retrieve underutilized owned resources from another job site for redeployment

Safety and savings go hand-in-hand

Promoting safe vehicle operations and proactively monitoring fleet utilization can improve both fleet operations and your bottom line.

• Cut speeding fines and accident costs: Monitoring events such as hard braking, harsh cornering, quick starts and speeding are indicators that your drivers may be more likely to be in an accident.
• Reduce maintenance spending: When aggressive driving happens, your vehicles often take the brunt of it, spending more time in the garage for extensive (and expensive) repairs.
• Decrease insurance premium costs: Check with your insurance provider to see if they offer this type of discount for using a GPS fleet tracking solution.

For more information on how your organization can take advantage of the right fleet technology, download our Buyer’s Guide for Construction Fleets.