Construction Asset Tracking Software: Equipment, Attachments, Materials and Tools in One System

Construction assets fall into four groups that need different hardware. Powered machines — excavators, loaders, dozers, generators with an engine — take a ruggedized telematics device that reports location, engine hours, fuel, fault codes and utilization continuously. Towed and unpowered equipment — trailers, compressors, light towers, compactors — takes either a standalone battery or solar tracker or a Bluetooth tag, depending on whether it travels with the fleet's own trucks. Attachments and tools — buckets, breakers, plate compactors, survey gear, power tools — take Bluetooth tags read by any vehicle nearby. Materials — rebar, pipe, conduit, lumber — are tracked by delivery and consumption rather than by device, through geofenced deliveries and the project's own quantity records.

The software's job is to put all four on one map and one list, so a superintendent can ask where the plate compactors are and get an answer that includes the one in the back of a pickup.

Location by site, from geofences drawn around each project, so the asset list can be filtered by where things are and a transfer between sites is recorded without a form. Utilization, from engine hours on powered machines and from movement on tagged ones, so the fleet knows which of its twelve excavators earned their keep last month and which were rented while an owned one sat. Maintenance, driven by engine hours and fault codes rather than a calendar, with the work order raised when the interval arrives. And the exceptions: a machine that left a site after hours, an attachment that has not been seen in two weeks, a rental due back on Friday still on a site.

Material tracking is a different problem. A tracking device does not go on a bundle of rebar; what a fleet platform contributes is the delivery record — the truck's geofenced arrival at the site with a timestamp, the trailer or container tagged so the fleet knows which site it is on — while quantities delivered, installed and remaining live in the project management or estimating software. The useful integration links the two, so the delivery the tracking platform saw is the delivery the project system counts. Fleets that expect a telematics platform to do material takeoff are buying the wrong tool; fleets that expect a project tool to know where the trailer went are buying the wrong one too.

Standalone construction asset tools do the equipment list well and usually stop at the yard gate. A fleet platform that already tracks the trucks — and for most contractors that is Geotab through a reseller — tracks the machines and tags on the same map, with the trucks as the Bluetooth readers that make tags work on a site. The choice usually comes down to whether the fleet runs telematics on its vehicles already; if it does, adding the assets to it is cheaper and gives a single system. High Point GPS installs ruggedized GO devices and Bluetooth tags for contractors in Quebec, Ontario and the northeastern US and connects the asset data to project and maintenance software.