Construction and Concrete Dispatch Software: Sites, Equipment, Loads

Dispatch software for construction fleets treats the job site as the unit of work, and concrete dispatch software adds a clock to every load. A delivery fleet sends trucks to addresses. A construction fleet sends crews, trucks and equipment to sites, and the sites cause the trouble: they open and close, shift as the project moves, and come with gates, muster points and no-go zones, and the same site may take a pickup by one road and a lowboy by another. The work isn't a sequence of stops either. Crews and equipment have to be on site for a shift, while dump, water, fuel and service trucks cycle between sites and a yard or a pit. Parcel dispatch software handles this badly.

Turning every site into a geofence is the most useful thing telematics does for a construction fleet. The system records each arrival and departure of every vehicle and tracked machine on its own. The superintendent gets the day's attendance, the office gets hours to bill or cost against the job, and the dispatcher gets a live view of what is on each site. You draw a site's geofence once when the job opens and retire it when the job closes, so nobody has to remember to log in and out.

Rules fire when a vehicle leaves a site outside working hours or enters a site it isn't assigned to. That same mechanism catches equipment theft on a weekend and a truck taking the long way home.

Construction dispatch covers the excavator, the compactor and the generator, and none of them has a driver you can call. Powered equipment carries a rugged GPS tracking device and reports position, engine hours and fault codes the way a truck does. Unpowered assets such as trailers, containers and attachments carry a battery tracker that reports position on a schedule. The dispatcher's board then shows where each machine sits and whether it is running, and that settles the choice between sending a lowboy across town and using the machine already on the next site over. Engine hours by site are also the figures the estimator and the maintenance shop both ask for.

Ready-mix is perishable. Each load has a window from batching to placement, and a truck stuck in traffic may come back with a load nobody can use. Concrete dispatch works backwards from the pour (how many trucks, at what spacing, from which plant) and needs to know where every truck is in its cycle: loading, en route, on site, pouring, washing out, returning. Site geofences plus status from the driver's app give the dispatcher that cycle live. The next truck goes out when the site can take it, and a slow return shows up before it turns into a gap at the pour.

Many concrete producers connect telematics to the batch plant's own dispatch system, so ask about it. The telematics platform feeds truck positions and cycle times to that system through the API and leaves it in place.

These are the capabilities that count for construction and concrete work.

As an illustrative example, take a 108 cubic metre slab pour at 07:00, with twelve trucks carrying 9 cubic metres each from a plant 25 minutes away, run by a dispatcher using site geofences and truck status. 06:10: trucks 1 to 4 are batched and released at ten-minute intervals, so the first arrives as the crew is ready and the pump always has a truck waiting without a queue forming. 06:58: truck 1 enters the site geofence and shows on site. 07:12: truck 1 shows pouring, and truck 5 is released. 07:24: truck 1 is washing out, and truck 6 is released. 08:05: truck 3 has been en route for 38 minutes against a 25-minute norm, stuck behind a road closure, so the dispatcher releases truck 7 early and holds truck 8 to keep the pour from gapping. 09:40: the last truck is pouring. The cycle report shows an average of 71 minutes from batch to washout, with two trucks over the 90-minute limit in the job's specification, both because of the closure, and both get flagged for the quality file. The site geofence gave the office twelve arrivals and departures for the ticket, and the batch plant's system received the cycle times through the API.