No matter the number of pieces of equipment in one’s inventory, a contractor wants to know where it all is, at all times. Of course, the larger a fleet and crib of tools grows, and the more jobsites a company works on simultaneously, the harder it becomes to keep track of that equipment.

To counter these challenges, manufacturers, equipment dealers and rental houses are increasingly adopting various types of wireless tracking tools integrated into the equipment’s electronics suite.

Being able to track equipment in real time offers contractors the ability to know where their vehicles are located on a jobsite and how efficiently they are being used. Telematics are also an excellent theft deterrent.

“Some contractors have multiple divisions/companies within them that all use the assets from the parent company but will get billed for them. For example, the excavation division has a piece of equipment they will use for “X” amount of time and will be billed “X” for that asset,” explains Peter Gibbons, regional technology manager for Finning Canada in Surrey, B.C., adding, he has one customer with 16 different companies under one parent company. “Part of the challenge is just keeping track of where all these different assets are.”

Equipment can be tagged with locators that can be tracked via cellular or satellite. Gibbons says it typically takes three to five minutes to ping the location of a piece of equipment, depending on the reception in a geographic area.

“They can ping their location to know where those devices are at,” he says, adding that being able to track equipment can aid in its recovery. “If they can’t find it when they ping it and find out it’s in a far-off area, they can contact the police, send them over that data and they can go have a look and investigate.”

Connected monitoring

Gibbons says insurance considerations are another important aspect of being able to track equipment use, especially in the case of a rental house.

“If an accident happens while in possession of a company, it goes on their insurance,” he says.

At Finning Canada, customers can set up telematics subscriptions at various levels for reporting purposes. “You can have reports every 10 minutes, every hour, every week… we can change a subscription and see every 10 minutes and track a machine as it goes down the highway,” Gibbons says, adding that customers can start with very basic telematics packages and add on various reports as they need them so they do not get bogged down in unnecessary data.

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