In a construction business equipment and tools need to be used on jobs to justify the return on investment. Conversely, it is important to bring them back to the equipment facility once the job is done or if they are rented return them back to the vendor.
Having the right software provides visibility of available equipment and tools so you can easily see what is available for your job sites. Using status to detail where your equipment is and when it will be available for use is critical. For example; if you need 15 assets and see only 10 in the warehouse ready to be dispatched, but there are 5 more marked as in “inspection” you can know that you can get the rest when they ready in 24 hours. It is important to be able to see all that information in one place and have the option to drill to more detailed breakdown across both your own and third party equipment and tools.
Although a lot of effort is put into the logistics of sending equipment and tools out to your job sites, keeping an eye on what it out and making sure that it all comes back at the end of the job is sometimes overlooked.
The right software provides tools to improve your tracking of construction equipment and tool inventory to reduce losses and ensure that costs are accurately managed. In addition to various customizable control reports equipment software can provide a real-time view of what is out on a job site. Equipment facility managers and the project team out on site can all see the same information. Equipment or tools assigned to specific people on site from specific vendors or just “on-rent” can be quickly seen by filtering records in just a couple of clicks. As you close down the job site, any un-returned equipment is tracked and can be charged for as a loss against the job site if you wish. Processing a loss updates your asset register automatically to ensure that nothing is left unaccounted.
Another potentially dangerous area of rental losses is re-rental. Failing to return something to an external vendor as a job site closes down can be a very expensive. Worse yet is mistakenly returning an external asset to your own yard and failing to off-rent it with the vendor until months later which can be very costly.
Operational transactions can be configured to generate return information to external vendors automatically for re-rented equipment. External assets are tracked as thoroughly as your own, so if a job site has lost a digger rented from a rental yard, you will know instantly that it hasn’t been returned and you are still paying the rental charges!
