GPS Fleet Tracking for Excavation & Demolition

On a time-and-materials job, the excavator's hours are the invoice. A GO RUGGED device on the machine reads engine hours from the machine itself, and MyGeotab records them against the site the machine is sitting in. When the client's site superintendent says the 320 was on site for six hours on Thursday and the invoice says nine, the record shows the machine entered the site geofence at 6:48, ran until 16:12 with forty minutes of idle at lunch, and left on the lowboy at 16:40. The contractor is paid for the hours worked, and the argument does not happen twice.

Running is not the same as working. An IOX-AUXM input reads the hydraulic PTO or a work-mode circuit, and the platform records when the machine was digging against when it was idling with the cab heater on. Utilization reports show a dozer that ran seven hours and pushed for three, which is the report a contractor uses to decide whether the site needs that dozer or whether it should be on the next job. Idle time on a fleet of diesel machines is also fuel, and the report puts a number on it by machine and by operator.

A mass excavation moves thousands of cubic metres in dump trucks, and every truck cycle is a ticket that somebody has to reconcile. Geofences around the site and around the fill site or the pit record each truck's arrival and departure, and the arrivals at the fill are the load count. Hired trucks are paid on that count; the client is invoiced on that count; and the two counts match because they come from the same record. When a broker's invoice shows loads the geofence never saw, the contractor has the times and positions of every load it did see.

The cycle-time report shows where the trucks spend their day: loading under the excavator, on the road, queued at the fill, or parked at a coffee shop with a full box. When the excavator is waiting on trucks, the site needs more; when the trucks are queued, it needs fewer. High Point GPS sets the report up so the foreman sees the day's cycle count and average cycle time on a phone before the last truck is back. A truck that takes a longer route to the fill, or stops on the way, shows up in the same report with the time it cost.

A mini excavator on a trailer is gone in ten minutes, and a skid steer is gone in five. Every site High Point GPS sets up is a geofence with a schedule. A machine that starts, moves or leaves the fence outside working hours triggers an alert to the owner's phone with the machine's position, and the GO RUGGED device keeps reporting as the machine moves. The police get a live location and a direction of travel, and the machine that is recovered the same night is the one that stays off the insurance claim. Battery trackers on trailers and Bluetooth tags on attachments extend the same coverage to the things that leave the site with the machine.

The geofence record also settles which machine was on which site. Equipment moved by lowboy between three sites in a week carries a record of every site it entered and how long it stayed, so the hours on each job are the hours inside that fence. When a client asks why a compactor was billed to their site on a day the foreman says it was elsewhere, the site history for the machine answers in a minute. Asset tags on buckets, breakers and plates show which machine each attachment was last seen with, which is how a missing breaker gets found on the wrong truck.

A daily walk-around on an excavator is a legal requirement in most places and a good idea everywhere. The Geotab Drive app on the operator's phone or tablet carries a checklist built for the machine: tracks, hydraulic lines, bucket pins, fire extinguisher. A defect is a photo and a note that goes to the shop as a work order before the machine starts the day, and the record shows who inspected what and when. When a hose fails and a client asks whether the machine was inspected, the DVIR history is the answer.

Maintenance reminders run on the engine hours the device reads, so a 500-hour service on a dozer is scheduled when the machine reaches it rather than when the mechanic notices the sticker. Fault codes from the engine reach the shop as the machine logs them, and a machine with a rising coolant temperature on Wednesday is the one that gets looked at before Thursday's pour. Across a fleet of thirty machines on eight sites, the mechanic's day is planned from the platform instead of from phone calls, and the hours lost to breakdowns show up in the utilization report as the number they are.