Construction Equipment Telematics: Tracking Heavy Machines, Not Just Trucks

Construction equipment telematics reports a heavy machine's engine hours, location by site, diagnostic faults and utilization, because a machine's life runs on hours instead of distance. Excavator telematics, for example, shows how long the machine worked, how long it idled, which site it was on and which faults it logged. Truck telematics is organized around odometer, trips, routes and speed, while a machine on a site may move a few hundred metres a day. Nobody logs in to drive it, so the device has to work out who ran it and for how long. It lives outdoors in dust, vibration and wash-down, and its diagnostic interface, if it has one, isn't the standard connector a truck device plugs into. Machines left on an open site at night are also exposed to theft, and stolen equipment is often never recovered.

That is why equipment telematics emphasizes different data and different hardware: sealed, externally mounted devices for powered machines, and battery trackers for anything without an engine. An excavator is often worth many times the pickup that hauled it, so the hardware has to match the asset. Machines without manufacturer telematics get a GPS tracker for equipment wired to the machine, and newer Caterpillar, John Deere, Komatsu and Kubota machines can send their own data instead.

Here is the hardware by asset type. Our guide to the best GPS tracker for heavy equipment compares the models machine by machine.

Machine maintenance intervals are set in hours. If you read them off the hour meter whenever somebody last visited the site, you service machines too early or too late. Telematics reports hours continuously, so you schedule service from real use and see diagnostic faults as they happen. A machine left running with no work getting done shows up as fuel burned for nothing. Rental fleets bill from the same hours, taken from the device instead of a meter reading the customer wrote down.

Each site is a geofence, so the platform knows which machines are on which site and when they arrived and left. The superintendent gets the day's attendance from that, the estimator gets hours by job, and you get an alert when a machine moves at two in the morning. Theft is where equipment telematics pays for itself in one event: a machine leaving a site outside working hours triggers an alert, and the device keeps reporting position until someone recovers it. Battery trackers on trailers and attachments give the same protection to the assets that are easiest to take, and construction asset tracking software puts them on one list with the machines.

Hours worked against hours available, per machine and per month, is the report most contractors have never seen, and it changes the fleet. It shows the machines that sit idle, the rentals running while an owned machine waits at the yard, and the machines worked so hard they should be replaced. A contractor reading it for the first time may find a machine to sell or a rental to cancel, and savings like these can help pay for the project.

Here is what a contractor's first monthly utilization report can show, in an illustrative example. Two excavators worked over 85 percent of available hours, which justifies the third one on rental and may justify a fourth. One wheel loader worked 18 percent, parked at a yard while a rented loader worked a site forty minutes away; that loader should have been transferred instead of rented. A generator billed to a job for the whole month ran 61 engine hours, and that is the number the job should pay for. A skid steer spent 34 percent of its engine hours idling, which costs fuel and wear and points to an operator habit worth a conversation. Nobody needed a site visit to find any of it, and the report runs on its own on the first of every month.