Fleet Management for Construction

Treating them the same is why most construction deployments underdeliver.

A road vehicle is measured on journeys, routes and fuel per kilometre. A machine is measured on engine hours, idle share, and fuel per hour of actual work.

The metric that matters on plant is the ratio of productive running to total running. A machine that is powered for ten hours and working for four is burning a shift of fuel for less than half a shift of output, and nothing about that shows up in a distance report.

Plant idles for reasons that are all fixable once visible: waiting on material, waiting on another machine, or simply left running through a break because restarting is inconvenient.

Measuring it per machine and per site turns an abstract complaint into a specific one, which is the only version anyone acts on.

The comparison worth making is between machines doing the same job on different sites, because that isolates supervision and sequencing from the machine itself.

Site refuelling by bowser removes the paper trail that a filling station provides, which makes both reconciliation and theft harder to see.

Level monitoring on the machine gives the other side of the record: how much actually entered the tank, and whether it left again while the machine was off.

The signature is the same as in road transport, a sharp drop while stationary and unpowered rather than a slope. See fuel monitoring.

Equipment on hire is billed on hours. Without an independent record, the supplier’s hour meter is the only evidence and disputes are unwinnable.

An independent running-hour record turns that into a reconcilable number, and it usually pays for the deployment on its own within a season.

Site-level geofences answer the other recurring question, which is simply where a machine is now. See geofencing.