By James Neely/Guest Author
For residents in urban areas, construction is a part of life. Almost all city dwellers will encounter a construction site at some point in their day, and some will see bulldozers and dump trucks when they look out the front window. But where does all that construction equipment go at the end of the workday? It’s not feasible to pack everything up and cart it back to a warehouse or secure parking area, and for that reason many contractors will leave vehicles and equipment in place on the jobsite where they become tempting targets for theft. In order to reduce the chances of losing equipment and materials over the course of a job, more and more companies have begun protecting their construction equipment with GPS tracking systems.
A GPS tracking device placed inside a vehicle or on a piece of equipment or material will send signals at intervals to a computer, allowing construction managers to monitor their assets even when away from the job site. If a piece of equipment is stolen, law enforcement officers can recover it much more quickly with the information provided by the tracking unit than they could without that information. Companies that choose not to implement GPS tracking technology on the job site see thousands of dollars in losses each year due to theft since many of the vehicles stolen will never be recovered, while those that do monitor their equipment with the technology see savings in the thousands.
In addition to location monitoring, GPS tracking also provides construction managers with information about their employees’ driving habits. They can tell which drivers maintain the speed limit in their company vehicles, which ones leave equipment idling over the lunch break, and which ones take a detour for personal reasons while driving the company vehicle on the clock. Information can be viewed in real time or as a report at the end of the day, with each stop noted along with the length of time spent at each place. With this information in hand, managers can implement training programs that teach drivers how to conserve fuel and they can address any problem behavior that crops up.
Companies across the nation currently face economic struggles, but GPS tracking provides construction businesses with the knowledge and resources they need to make the most of every dollar. Savings garnered by conserving fuel and protecting assets from theft will quickly justify the cost of implementing GPS tracking units for the jobsite.
