Is 2025 The Year to Electrify Your Fleet?
With hundreds of vehicles and different pieces of equipment being used on a job site, keeping an eye on everything is a challenge. This struggle is further magnified if you’re looking after multiple sites. Luckily, each of your assets produces masses of valuable data that can be used to drive down costs, improve site efficiency and monitor behaviour.
Drawing a geofence or digital boundary around your sites will allow you to see everything that enters or leaves the area, along with relevant insights from your telematics system. Armed with this knowledge, you can make sure your site is operating securely and safely, without hurting efficiency.
Here are three ways geofences will benefit your construction business.
Site Visibility
With a geofence enabled on your job site, you can identify every vehicle that enters or leaves the area. This allows you to record the exact time they arrive and leave, how long they spent onsite, the speed they were travelling at and how they behaved (both on and between job sites). This information will help you to measure and compare site productivity, so you can identify any company assets that have been misused or left idle. Tracking the availability of assets within your geofence also means you can assign jobs based on the nearest vehicle or piece of equipment, minimising the time and money spent on completing tasks.
Theft Protection
Construction equipment theft is an ongoing issue for the industry. The total value of plant, equipment and heavy trucks stolen from Australian businesses in 2014 was more than $51 million. With geofences, the risk of anything being stolen is considerably lower. You’ll receive an immediate email or SMS alert if something leaves or enters a job site outside of scheduled operating hours. For example, if a truck is only supposed to be used between 6am and 4pm, you’ll receive a notification straight away if someone’s trying to move it offsite late at night. This gives you time to investigate and inform the authorities if it looks like theft. And with GPS tracking, you can pinpoint the exact location of a stolen asset so it can be easily recovered.
Environmental Compliance
Many sites are restricted by local regulations that enforce a noise curfew, or limit access to certain areas due to historical or environmental significance. You may be restricted from working on a site considered to be sacred, or a location close to an endangered species. Placing a geofence around these areas will help you identify any breaches of these rules so you can respond immediately. Timely, accurate data also helps you respond to complaints. If residents grumble about machinery being used at 5am you can check your records and speak with the employees responsible – or report back that there was no work being done at the time.
Geofences help to make your sites more transparent, manageable and productive. With clear visibility into everything entering or leaving the site, you can deploy assets more effectively and keep track of driver or operator behaviour. Combined with GPS tracking data, this helps to keep your site secure, protecting your business from unauthorised access.