Based and founded in New Orleans, Boh Bros. Construction Co.is a family-owned, third-generation company that has completed thousands of heavy civil, industrial, and marine construction projects throughout the Southeast United States since 1909. They began a pilot with FleetWatcher in July of this year and just recently came on board as a new customer. How did they decide to invest in FleetWatcher? James Breland, Operations Manager of their Asphalt Department notes: "The market for asphalt work continues to be very competitive in our area, and we continuously search for ways to help optimize our operations. We were looking for ways to improve our hauling costs, and after many meetings with the FleetWatcher team, we felt FleetWatcher’s Material Management Solution (MMS) would be the right tool to help us do this."

As one of the largest heavy civil contractors and one of the largest asphalt producers in Florida, Hubbard Construction Company (HCC)  is owned by Eurovia (a subsidiary of VINCI) based in Orlando, Florida with Divisions located in Jacksonville, Tampa and Lakeland. Founded in 1920, HCC is a multi-faceted general contracting company that performs design build and bid build projects throughout the State of Florida. The scope of their work  includes large design build infrastructure, heavy highway construction, highway maintenance, bridge construction, bridge repair, asphalt supply and heavy civil site projects. 

Repeat Job Provides Comparison Data and $60,000 to the Bottom Line!

When the management at Gallagher Asphalt made the decision to purchase Fleetwatcher, they expected immediate results. So when a "repeat" paving job was kicked-off, management knew this would be an opportunity for a good comparison.

"Each year, a village near Chicago paves several roads, typically taking 5-6 weeks to complete. We did this job last year and were doing what was essentially the same job this year - same number of streets, same mix, same distance, same bid. The only difference was having Fleetwatcher installed," says Jonkman. 

The result? Last year, Gallagher finished the job $60,000 over budget on trucking costs. This year, the company finished $500 under budget!

Komatsu America recently did an article with Earthwave Technologies customer, Rich Fuist of RIPA Associates. Rich talks about some of the benefits they have seen with the use of Fleetwatcher. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Part one of 'EarthwaveTechnologies Improves Fleet Management to Increase Profits'

Not Simply Technology, But Process Change

While it makes sense, you’d be surprised by how many companies violate the old rule: don’t buy technology for technology’s sake. In other words, just because something looks great and does some amazing things it doesn’t mean that it will make your business better. Technology by itself is basically useless. You can collect all of the data you want. You can print and review reports to fill your office, but if you don’t have a way of acting on that data or of interpreting those reports, you are no better off than if you had simply taken the day off. For technology to add some value to a company, some of that company’s processes and/or methods need to change. This change does not have to be extreme in order to get a significant amount of value out of a new technology. In fact, the best way of adopting new technology is to employ a three-step plan for process change. Each step is incremental and allows a company to integrate the new technology when and where most appropriate. The process change steps are:

IMPROVE FLEET MANAGEMENT TO INCREASE PROFITS
Today the construction industry is in essentially the same place as the U.S. manufacturing industry was in the early 1990s - trapped between the declining margins of a competitive environment and a lack of the efficient processes needed to grow. In the early 1990s, manufacturing used the same basic methods and processes for planning, tracking, producing, shipping and selling products that had been in place since the 1960s. Paper and human reporting were everywhere. Critical data arrived to decision makers desks too late to be useful. Operational control was more black magic than science, and communications was glacially slow.

Fleetwatcher is a comprehensive Management Information System that impacts and affects many people, processes and departments within the heavy equipment contractor’s organization. Specifically, Fleetwatcher and Earthwave help our customers solve problems.

The following identifies the problems our customers have indicated that Fleetwatcher helps them address and solve, in order of magnitude.  

1. Underproductive Equipment and Operators/Drivers