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Years ago it was called
asset management, and the goal was to improve productivity. These
days it’s called communication. With an array of vehicle-monitoring
and tracking programs and a host of hardware, the effective use
of state-of-the-art communication service systems has become critical
to contractors who aim to stay on top.
From relatively uncomplicated
tracking systems to two-way text messaging to high-speed in-field
Internet access, the communication industry has entered the construction
market with an array of products and systems. An industry that used
to depend on land lines and radio networks (and someone on the other
end in the right place at the right time) is now confronted with
a barrage of products and service options made possible by global
positioning systems (GPS) and rapidly expanding wireless technology.
Verizon and Nextel have joined with communication-device suppliers
and integrators to offer one-stop shopping for contractors who know
they need more than a cell phone to do the job, while myriad smaller
companies are marketing to companies that are just beginning to
understand the importance of high-speed connections and real time.
“It’s a matter
of controlling operational inefficiencies,” says Tim Lewis,
senior director of construction equipment operations for Qualcomm
Wireless Business Solutions. “The first place you want to use
these systems is on machines that you don’t touch every day,
and on equipment that needs to be touched and maintained a lot.”
Qualcomm entered the construction market based on its success in
over-the-road trucking and now offers a range of products from tracking
to two-way communications, including GlobalTRACS, which provides
engine use and vehicle location data. It also offers OmniTRACS,
which allows two-way communication between dispatch and a company’s
in-field assets.
But tracking the whereabouts
of a vehicle or a piece of equipment is only the beginning. Contractors
today can communicate with their equipment to accumulate information
that makes preventative maintenance more effective. They can monitor
where their employees are and what they’re doing; they can
improve dispatching and accomplish real-time problem-solving with
operators and other personnel in the field.
“Construction companies
are using all types of different services,” says Andy Perlik,
director of data sales for Verizon Wireless in San Diego. “Any
organization that has a team of field-service people or a team out
in the field using equipment should be updating their communications
capabilities.”
Beginning With Small
Steps
Ed Radford, an operations manager for Hayward Baker Inc. in Fort
Worth, TX, has been testing On-Board Communications’ AssetTraks
vehicle-tracking system on five of the company’s Caterpillar
D3 bulldozers and two of its over-the-road trucks. Based on results
so far, Radford plans to outfit the company’s entire fleet
of 25 machines with the On-Board system. “We’re utilizing
it for tracking purposes, but more importantly for maintenance,”
he says. “We were having a hard time getting information on
actual machine operating hours, and as a result, our maintenance
was lacking. Once we get a large majority of the fleet rigged up,
we’re going to set it up so our Caterpillar dealer, which actually
does the maintenance, can access the same information.”
Like similar programs,
On-Board’s system tracks vehicle hours and sends the data to
a central Web site, where it’s accessible via the Internet.
Another plus, Radford says, is that the locating device makes it
easier to get service vehicles where they’re needed. “On
a lot of our jobs there are no physical locations, no streets,”
he says. “But this way whoever’s doing the service can
pull up the machine’s exact location. And I don’t have
to worry about faxing maps and directions.”
Radford wants to set
up the On-Board system to alert the Caterpillar dealer when individual
machines are due for service. Other users do their own calculations
based on routine polling of equipment to determine hours. RDO Equipment
Co., a John Deere dealer in Riverside, CA, for example, equips all
Deere tractors it sells to a local rental agency with Heavy Track.com’s
tracking and communication system. Since all the machines are on
a three-year lease and will be returned eventually to the dealer
for resale, keeping up on maintenance makes good business sense,
says customer support advisor Ron Monter. “This way we can
keep an eye on each individual machine, and when we want to re-sell
a piece of equipment we know what we’re selling,” he says.
“We track the hours and locations. We go online and check what
machines are due for service. If we hear from the customer that
a piece of equipment needs a repair of some kind, we can poll the
machine and find out where it is and which of our two dealerships
it’s closest to. This way we don’t go out looking for
a machine and find it’s not where we were told it was supposed
to be.” Another important feature, Monter says, is that the
programs generate archival information—a historical record
for each machine—which is useful not only for assessing productivity,
but also for more accurate job billing and bidding.
At Hayward Baker, Radford
is also thinking of using On-Board’s AssetTraks to track ancillary
equipment, such as the large drills the company ships all over the
country. “We’ll send one to one place and then they send
it somewhere else, and if we want to know where it is, we have to
get on the telephone. This way we can go on the Web site, plug in
a number, and there it is.”
At Verizon, Perlik suggests
other possibilities for remote monitoring. “With our telemetry
service, a contractor can monitor the fuel level in a temporary
generator, for example, and save someone on the crew from making
a trip on a Saturday or Sunday to see if everything’s OK,”
he says. “This is the kind of productivity managers should
be thinking about.”
Unexpected Benefits
One bonus Radford hadn’t anticipated when he installed AssetTraks
is a 6% drop in payroll. “We don’t have a supervisor on
every job,” he says, “but we’ve discovered that the
employees’ knowledge that the machine hours are being tracked
has resulted in a reduction in the number of hours being reported
on payroll.”
For even better accountability,
Perlik says, supply your in-field employees with a PDA and have
them log in electronically. “At the end of the day, they’ll
find out that although they think they arrived on the site at 7:30,
when they click on they’ll find out it was really 7:45. Over
the course of time, those 15 minutes add up.”
Asked about the cost
of investing in this kind of tracking system, Radford shrugged.
“You have one blown maintenance report because someone didn’t
get their hours turned in or you didn’t get maintenance personnel
out there on time, you blow an engine, and you could pay for this
type of a system on the entire fleet for several years.”
In a twist on the tracking
function, John Murphy, systems coordinator at Scott & Murphy
Inc. in Bowling Green, KY, has solved recurrent vandalism by installing
On-Board’s system on the company’s mobile equipment trailer,
which is rigged with a solar panel that charges the unit’s
12-V power supply. If the door is opened during a time the trailer
is supposed to be buttoned up, Kelly gets a call on his cell phone.
Murphy would like to see the company equip all of its trucks and
equipment with the On-Board system. “In this business maintenance
can be kind of hit and miss,” he says, “and it would be
effective to know how many hours a backhoe’s been used on a
particular job.” Currently, equipment utilization and location
is tracked by hand. “Right now we’re carrying a book around.
In my mind there’s got to be an easier way to do this.”
But Murphy also points
out that tracking maintenance electronically is likely to require
some re-evaluation of company procedure. “You’re going
to realize what you’re not doing, and when you see what you’re
not doing, you’re going to realize you don’t have enough
people to do the job right,” he says. “Because lots of
times when it comes to maintenance you’re just putting out
fires. The other thing is that as you start collecting data on your
equipment to track for preventative maintenance, you’ve got
to have somebody dedicated to managing the information so that it
can also be used, for example, to bill against jobs.”
Al Coulter, equipment
manager for Jones Brothers Inc. in Mt. Juliet, TN, has been using
Heavy Track’s tracking system as an antitheft device. He cautions
that companies thinking of tracking a large fleet for maintenance
should remember that these types of GPS-based systems work to the
extent that they are uniformly installed. “There’s no
use in having three or four different ways of doing it,” says
Coulter, who is responsible for 2,500 pieces of equipment nationwide.
GPS Alternatives
Although GPS has so far made the most inroads in vehicle tracking,
a new company, Dulles, VA–based SkyBitz, is marketing a Global
Location System (GLS) platform for customers concerned that cell
phone reception is iffy—and where battery life is an issue.
“One of the problems with GPS is short battery life,”
says Roni Taylor, Skybitz executive vice president of marketing.
“Our engineers came up with the idea for the GLS platform,
which extends battery life for up to three years. What we offer
is a two-way satellite communications device, about 9 inches by
7 inches, that’s installed on the equipment you want to keep
track of, from machines to units that have no power of their own.
The unit ‘wakes up’ and takes a snapshot of its position,
then sends the raw data across our communications satellite to our
operations center, where the position calculation is done and then
sent to the customer via Internet. It takes less than 40 seconds.
In contrast, a typical GPS device or a radio with a GPS chip set
embedded in it wakes up, takes a snap shot, and performs its own
calculations, which means it uses more power.”
In Salinas, CA, where
cell phone dead spots are a problem, Bart Walker, vice president
of Pacific Ag Rentals, is using the SkyBitz system to track equipment
and maintenance. “We have over 600 pieces of equipment up and
down California and in Nevada,” Walker says. “We need
to keep track of where they are and how many hours are on them since
they left our yard. Before we had this system, we had to try and
call the farmer and the farmer had to try and call his ranch hand.
And we still didn’t have any way to know if we got the right
tractor.”
Walker worked with SkyBitz
to develop what the company calls its InSight Engine Hours Meter
because he wanted to be more efficient about servicing his widely
scattered machines. “Every 200 hours we can locate the tractors
within a given area,” he says. “At the same time, we also
look at the other tractors that might be getting close to needing
service at maybe 180 hours. Then we send one technician out to service
them all at the same time.”
After-Market Products
Beyond passive vehicle tracking are engine diagnostic add-ons from
equipment manufacturers such as Caterpillar (Product Link) and Case
(FleetLink), and Volvo (MATRIS), but which are also available from
a range of after-market product suppliers. Field Technologies in
San Diego offers a system that not only tracks the vehicles on which
it’s installed, but ties into a vehicle’s computer to
send alerts when it detects mechanical problems. “A lot of
companies that originally began using these systems to track their
employees or their assets have started migrating toward maintenance,”
says company representative Yukon Palmer. “Our system alerts
them when the vehicle meets manufacturer-suggested mileage points.”
So far the system applies
to post-1996 light-duty and post-1998 heavy-duty trucks. For heavy
equipment, Field Technologies markets a system, which is tied to
a machine’s ignition, that calculates engine hours. Contractors
who are looking to communicate with in-field operators as well as
machines can take advantage of two-way messaging. “A company
can actually plug a laptop into this device and give their employees
Internet access from the field,” Palmer says.
Northern California–based
Sun Ergoline has done just that. “The system serves two purposes,”
says Jorgen Larson, who runs the maintenance division. “One
is we know exactly where the technician is, so when a customer calls,
we can tell them when to expect them on the next job. Two, each
vehicle is equipped with Internet access, so we have e-mail capabilities
and our employees can check online documentation. And they e-mail
us back when they’re finished with a job. More than that, this
allows us to monitor what our personnel are doing. Are they driving
too fast, for example? Where have they been during the last month?
If you have people you’re supervising offsite, this is the
way to do it.”
A Boon to Dispatch
Dispatch is one of the communications challenges where Andy Perlik
thinks wireless shines. “The typical model here is the repair
guys meet at the main office in the morning, where they’re
given a very meticulous list of their stops for the day. Then they
get in their truck with their list and they take off. Twenty minutes
later the company’s biggest customer calls—they need somebody
right away. So you pick someone who’s heading to San Diego,
say, and bring him back to L.A. In the meantime, another customer
in San Diego calls and he’s also important, and so now you’re
pulling somebody from L.A. to go to San Diego. This kind of crisscrossing
happens all the time. By using wireless services with the right
device not only can you communicate with drivers, you can also track
the location of their vehicles. You can look at a computer screen
and see that you’ve got Mary right over there in that area
and dispatch the call to her.
“So what really
happens is dispatching becomes real-time,” Perlik says. “We
don’t give the technician a predetermined list. We give them
a PDA or a tablet PC and tell them when they’re clear on their
call to click, and the next call closest to their geographic location
will drop in.”
“With text messaging,”
says Greg Gilmer of Peak Wireless Inc. in Escondido, CA, which also
markets two-way communications, “you know you’ve gotten
through. You get confirmation. You also get a date and a time, which
can be critical for verifying job performance. And with GPS we can
also tie the location to it, so we know actually where the person
was when they responded to the message. At Peak we’re partnering
with Nextel with a location application that runs on a GPS Java–enabled
telephone. We actually track by the telephone itself. What this
means is you have full-control remote control. Because when a truck
leaves the yard or an employee leaves the office, you’re blind
about what’s going on until they come in and report back to
you. This type of technology gives you the ability to be on the
job site all day long.”
“Certainly every
situation is a little bit different,” Perlik says. “At
Verizon, we worked with a very large company that had 25 very large
machines that traveled over so many square miles throughout the
day, and company managers were concerned that the drivers were able
to keep both hands on the wheel. But the drivers were given their
instructions via a piece of paper that was faxed out to the yard.
They were carrying this around with them and driving this huge machine.
And then every time they were done with a project, they had to drive
the machine back to get another piece of paper.
“With wireless we
were able to drop the assignment to them on a screen mounted inside
the cab. The device was about the size of a PDA and it was mounted
right on the dashboard, which means they can now keep both hands
on the wheel. They don’t have to worry about legibility if
their instructions get crinkled up or spoiled or stained or whatever.
And the way we set up the service the drivers could also make voice
calls. In their particular case the company programmed a dozen sentences
they thought represented the scenarios that were likely to occur
in the field, and we set it up so they were accessed by one button:
‘I’m broken down. I’m clear, ready for another dispatch,
or I’m held up here because…’ All the driver has
to do is type in the time.”
“The point,”
says Gilmer at Peak Wireless, “is we can collect data out in
the field, assemble it electronically into a data depository, and
then customize what that data looks like and what managers can do
with it. A lot of people use this kind of vehicle-tracking information
for payroll and to automate their forms processing.”
It is also used for inventory,
Perlik says. “Let’s say I’m going to repair a motor
and a belt and let’s say that is an inventory that’s carried
on my truck. In the past what happened was I used the belt and the
motor and then I’d go back to the office and turn in the paperwork
and they’d place an order for what I used. But in the meantime
my truck is inventory-deficient. With this type of system, the minute
I use the part, that information is being sent into the main system
and the part is ordered. So chances are very good that when I go
back in, they’ll have a box of parts for me.”
Integrating Systems
The key to making use of these technologies, Gilmer says, is integration.
“We do everything from wireless to fixed connections as well
as interfacing with any older data-management systems customers
might have.” Asked where a customer should start, he suggested
with an off-the-shelf vehicle-tracking or -monitoring product. “This
would cost them between $20 and $60 a month per vehicle, hardware,
service, and the back-end reporting. From there we might recommend
our smart-camera technology. They can use their existing cameras
or our own wireless cameras, which are about as big as a quarter.
Yard management is a big camera application; we basically file information
based on objects. So if you want to know how many pieces of equipment
of a certain type left or entered the yard within a certain time,
you can do it using the cameras. Or you can monitor a point of interest
to document that something did or did not occur at a site. And you
can go back into the database and visually check the history of
a piece of equipment. All of this in a matter of seconds.
“Next we might recommend
a temporary tracking network using radio frequency identification
tags [RFID],” Gilmer continues. “Let’s say you have
a long-term project like building a bridge. We can create a private
network within the job site based on wireless connectivity from
laptops or handhelds. We use semi-passive, battery-operated RFID
tags on equipment like generators. You can do the same thing with
tracking pallets of equipment.”
Perlik says for new Verizon
customers, voice communications get the initial go-over. “Many
companies don’t have phones deployed broad enough within their
organization to have a complete communications solution, and the
phones they do have are probably not on optimum plans,” he
says. “A common situation is that they’ve had the phones
for years and haven’t looked at their rate plans or upgraded.
They’ve piecemealed a network together over a period of years.
What we’re doing is called optimizing. We take all their bills
and we run them through our system, and we determine what plan they’d
be on if they were purchasing this service today. And you’d
be amazed at how many thousands and thousands of dollars we can
save a company in the first year. The next step is to show them
what they can do with their phones–for example, sending photographs.
A supplier sends you the wrong part, you send them a photograph,
and in seconds the situation is rectified. Another thing is text
messaging. A lot of companies don’t realize that I can actually
send you a text message a lot cheaper than I can call you and speak
to you. Because when we’re talking, we’re talking about
other things than the business I called you about. But if the problem
is that I’ve got a cement truck ready to dump cement in a hole
that’s not supposed to have it in there yet, I need to get
you right away.
“Next we would look
at the kind of information a company is tracking and bringing back
to headquarters to analyze job progress and general productivity.
We look for what we call hot buttons, the details that are critical
for that business. Every business has six or seven things they track
on a daily basis. What we want to know is how fast this is getting
back to headquarters, because in this day and age, it should be
there immediately. The priorities are speed and accuracy. At that
point we get into the kind of software they’re using and we
start bringing in partners like @Road with their vehicle-location
systems, and we start talking about what devices will be the best
to accomplish what they want.”
What’s up for the
future? Verizon has already rolled out a new service, Broadband
Access, which Perlik describes as offering DSL speeds on wireless,
300 to 500 kilobits per second, but at the same cost as the company’s
current National Access (60 to 80 kilobits.) Already available in
three major markets—San Diego; Washington, DC; and Las Vegas—at
the time of this writing Broadband Access was expected to be in
a third of Verizon’s markets by the end of 2004 and in all
major markets coast to coast by 2005. “The place where this
comes into play on a construction site,” Perlik says, “is
PDF files, which you will be able to unload in minutes in the field
and immediately put them to use. And if you’re a supervisor
being driven around a job site, you can get out your laptop and
get on Broadband Access and you’ll be connected. You don’t
have to be in a fixed location. You’ll be truly mobile.”
Penelope Grenoble
O’Malley is a frequent contributor to environmental publications.
GEC
- January/February 2005
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