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