Construction industry needs asset tracking efficiency boost

Rodney Gedda, lead author of the report - which was commissioned by GPS technology company Navman Wireless - said the benefits of asset management were well proven. “Effective asset management can have profound implications for the operational efficiency and overall profitability of companies in the construction, mining and transport industries. [However] today only 50 percent of organisations use asset tracking or location based services like fleet management solutions,carbon fabric despite 93 percent of the organisations that do so reporting a positive return on investment.”

Telsyte says its research found that, on average, organisations deploying asset tracking solutions achieved a 124 percent return on investment.

Telsyte asked business leaders in heavy industries to indicate their main business challenges, both internal and external. Fifty eight percent identified operational efficiency as the main internal challenge and 41 percent said it was the lack of people and skills.vacuum bottlemodern lighting The main external challenges were labour costs and rising production and energy costs.

Telsyte found that asset and location-based tracking technologies were used by only half of the construction and heavy industry companies it surveyed. However 23 percent indicated they had plans to deploy these.

Telsyte identified the biggest opportunities for efficiency gains from asset tracking as reduced fuel costs - 55 percent of respondents said that vehicle fuel was their largest consumer of energy - followed by building power. Better management of vehicle fleets could also bring other efficiencies, it suggested. “Fleet management can improve operations and workflow management, and hence reduce the occurrence of driver fatigue and help improve driver tyre equipmentsbehaviour.”

However maximum efficiency gains would only be achieved where asset tracking was tightly integrated with back office systems, such as enterprise resource planning, the report said.carbon prepreg And among the companies surveyed that had already deployed asset tracking solutions, such integration was often lacking: only 21 percent claimed fully automated integration with ERP and general asset management systems, 58 percent needed some manual data processing and 22 percent had no integration at all.