Texas Hide & Seek

Texas Hide & Seek

"Any o' you boys seen a backhoe 'round here?"

If you're playing Hide & Seek with your equipment, you've already lost.

 

I am a firm believer in the idea that you can't fully appreciate what it takes to do something, until you've tried to do it yourself.  So, just to make my life more interesting (and to help finish migrating some equipment over to our system), I got to spend some time in the field with one of our clients' heavy machinery technicians last week.

 

(Talk about "steppin' in it"...)

First Things First:

As in most industries, we get caught up in "the next great thing."  In the location industry, we hear about cutting fuel-costs; excessive idling; improving driver safety; getting engine data from the electronic control systems; etc.  What we sometimes forget is why this is called the "location" industry.  It is all too easy to take finding a piece of equipment for granted until you lose the ability to find it.  As my job-site guide pointed out:  "It's a lot harder to fix 'em when you don't know where they are."

Well, that's just what happened.

Due to the nature of the work our client was doing, it was much less of an impact to the crews to remove the tracking-units from the equipment, upgrade and test them on the bench, and then re-install them the next day.  How difficult could that be?

There's a reason they're called "Mobile Assets":

 

When we showed up on the job-site the next morning, we were greeted with a little surprise.  (At least I was greeted with a surprise.)  Many of the pieces of equipment were no longer on that job-site, but others now were.  The number of backhoes, excavators, loaders and trucks might have been the same, but none of the numbers on the units were.  Now it's decision time.  Do we start chasing down the the units for which we had re-provisioned units, or do we take the old units out of the nearby units while we're right here?

 

Attempting to make a better decision, I asked the crews where "yesterday's" equipment was.  (Yes, I should have known better.)  Realizing that way madness lies, I decided it would be expedient to pull the units from the equipment that was in front of us, and then go find the other units from yesterday.

 

I suspect you can see where this is going...

 

"Shhh!  Be vewy, vewy quiet - we're hunting backhoes":

 

Now that I have several different job-sites worth of equipment with me, in various stages of programming, I drop my guide off to go talk with the equipment scheduler.  Interestingly, no one has told them that the equipment was moved.  Now, it's on to contacting the foremen and seeing which piece(s) of equipment they have on which job-sites.  Anyone want to guess how important it is to a foreman "which specific backhoe" he has on his site?  Even more interesting is learning just how good your (and their) cell-coverage is in the middle of Texas.  And THAT doesn't even begin to touch how well people can give directions when there aren't actual roads.

 

The Moral of the Story:

 

My mechanic friend hit the nail right on the head - if you can't find 'em, you can't fix 'em.  In all seriousness, my little forays down the rabbit-hole are trivial compared to what he does on a day-to-day basis.  His job, and that of many other people, depend on equipment being up and running.  Every minute that he spends traveling to, or looking for a machine, is time that he's not able to devote to getting it running.  Until last week, he didn't have access to the location system himself - old or new - and he's the person who's been installing all of them!

 

When you consider the investment a company has made into the tools, skills and vehicles to support their field equipment, I could make a pretty good ROI case based on the payback of just their mechanics' time.  Add in the fuel spent driving back and forth between locations, and I know I can more than justify it.  Add in the down-time or transportation costs for different equipment, and the question of how people got along without location systems screams at you.

 

How do I know?  

 

I've done it.

 

That the system works and is truly more effective?

 

I used the tracking system in my own truck to tag the job-sites we visited.  From then on, all I had to do was plug the GPS Coordinates into my navigation device and drive right back to the site.  Now that the units are back in the equipment, all it takes is a button-press or a text-message from the field to see exactly where they are and go to them.

 

And, even if they move while I'm in transit, I don't have to rely on a dozen grinning guys with shovels who can't remember having seen a backhoe...

 

For more information:

 

For more information on ComLink GTSEnterprise, FlexProtect and/or Asset Monitoring, just click on the spec-sheet at the top of this newsletter, or call ComLink GPS at 800.853.8165.