Some days running a business can feel like you’re treading water just to stay afloat. But on good days business leaders will have just enough bandwidth to manage their current day while planning for tomorrow. On days like this Walker Construction’s Scales/Truck Supervising Manager, Kevin Howard, is happy that his company has the telematic tools to prepare themselves to excel in tomorrow’s business climate.

Telematics are an invaluable addition to any equipment fleet,
including compact equipment like skid steers, compact excavators, dump trucks, and even company vehicles. Here are a few ways that telematics platforms are proving their worth to this important industry segment.

Driver safety is a concern for virtually any company that has vehicles on the road. In addition to the conduct of the drivers themselves, and interactions with those around them, there is the concern of how bad driver behavior might be perceived by the public. One Georgia contractor who operates an asphalt plant for their own paving projects and others and has a division that engages in heavy civil construction projects is using FleetWatcher telematics to rein in driver behavior. Here’s how they are using technology to reduce incidents of speeding (relative to the posted speed limit), hard braking,
fast starts and hard turns among their fleet of 150 on-road vehicles.

(Indianapolis, IN) – Border States Paving is a family-owned general contractor that operates 2 permanent asphalt plants as well as a one portable plant which produce asphalt for the paving projects that they complete throughout the Dakotas, Wyoming and eastern Montana. In addition to the traditional paving tools that they use daily, BSP crews have adopted technology including FleetWatcher telematics to eliminate over trucking, streamline their operations, and eliminate the waste of traditional paper tickets with e-ticketing. Early in 2022 they integrated their FleetWatcher e-ticketing with OnStation to determine exact locations more precisely for each load of asphalt placed. On a paving
project along US Highway 12 in South Dakota this technology integration not only increased their accuracy, but it also made their jobsites safer.

If you've ever felt like you're juggling too many projects at once, you're not alone. Chris Higgins, the Vice President of Engineering and Construction at Scotty's Contracting & Stone can emphasize. He wakes up every day with 400 pieces of heavy equipment to allocate across projects throughout Kentucky. On a good day it's a challenge. On a rainy day it's fire drill. But Higgins is prepared, thanks to a telematics tool that collects and displays data across his entire fleet, bridging the gaps between a dozen different equipment manufacturers. 

Getting over growing pains 

Scotty's Contracting & Stone is a heavy civil and paving contractor that has served a geographic footprint that ranges from Louisville to Nashville for 50 years. In that time the company has grown from 10 employees to over 600, dispatching more than 100 trucks a day through their 14 asphalt plants and 5 stone quarries. Third party trucks are supplied with FleetWatcher as well, so that all haul trucks have the same visibility. Visibility into the entire haul fleet allows Scotty's to see bottlenecks in real time and re-route trucks around them to shorten cycle times.

Earthwave Technologies, Indianapolis, offers the FleetWatcher telematics platform to monitor four key safe driver metrics, allowing companies to track and amend driver behavior. This GPS-based platform captures vehicle data from either the FleetWatcher App or from an in-vehicle device. It simplifies safe driver programs by focusing on four key metrics: 

• vehicle speed relative to posted speed limits; 
• fast starts;
• hard breaking; and
• hard turns.

This data is reported continuously and can be used to assign a numeric or letter grade to drivers, who can then be commended or counseled for their performance. Whether required by insurance carriers or as company policy, FleetWatcher customers using this feature have reported significantly improved driver grades when this is added to their safe driver programming.

In the last year, fuel prices have skyrocketed by more than 50%. We’ve seen many contractors struggle with the sudden and unexpected rise in costs and the effect it has had on job profitability. Fortunately, we’re here to tell you that although you can’t control the rise in fuel prices, you can control unproductive fuel burn. 

The FleetWatcher Real-Time Executive Scoreboard feature serves as a scorecard for the Materials Management System (MMS), allowing users to see key performance indicators (KPI's) in an easy to understand format on their phone, tablet or computer. 

• Provides real-time view of tons per hour by crew or truck, feet per minute, cycle time, trucking cost per ton and more
• Color coding shows at a glance which metrics need corrective action 
• Total tons loaded automatically compared to shift times to show users if they are ahead of schedule or behind 
• Metrics can be graphed to quickly show performance over time 
• Users can select KPIs to display and change them as desired

Onboarding of Earthwave Technologies popular FleetWatcher telematics platform is fast and easy since it captures data from OEM telematics systems with no additional hardware required.

Data from each piece of equipment within the fleet, regardless of manufacturer, class, or size, is seamlessly integrated into the FleetWatcher platform, with no labor costs.  With a clear view of all fleetwide assets, managers can better allocate equipment to enhance utilization, slash idle times to save fuel and equipment value, streamline maintenance, and more.

Earthwave’s Construction Management Solution was developed specifically for the “yellow iron” heavy construction industry and is ideal for off-road construction projects of all sizes and types.

They say that the devil is in the details. For a company that has been around since 1923 and employs more than 700 employees, E.R. Snell Contractor Inc. has a lot of details to deal with every day.

The family-operated company based in Atlanta, Ga., performs a variety of transportation construction jobs from Augusta to Macon and northern Georgia including roadway work, structural bridge work and asphalt paving and sales. On any given summer day, E.R. Snell is dispatching 150 to 200 asphalt trucks, a vast majority of which are third party truckers.

In handling their daily trucking, Executive Vice President Jared Snell knew there had to be a better way to manage the mountain of details that impact his company’s operations. Thankfully, he was right, and in an innovative telematics platform, they found a way to handle the details and exorcise their demons.