Those old enough to have seen episodes of the early TV years’ blockbuster, Dragnet, will recognize the title as a recurring line used by Sgt. Joe Friday trying to get the story straight from a witness to a crime.
The same admonition applies to us as we assess the soundness of our operations, where even the newest, most powerful accounting suite on the planet, will lead to faulty conclusions if we don’t have good data with which to work.
This in turn leads to the recognition that under most circumstances it’s the data collection tasks that offer the greatest promise for finding and plugging any leaks that have crept into your operating practices during the go-go years. Perhaps the most effective tools for aiding you in these tasks are emerging from several directions under the collective handle of “telematics,” a subject that we discussed at some length in Don Talend’s article, “Job-Site Insight,”, in our June issue.
If you want to know how much time each of your ADTs is standing idle, or which of your excavators is doing the most work, telematics holds the answers. Likewise, when it comes to scheduling, think how nice it is to have at your fingertips information on maintenance and servicing needs for your different pieces of equipment. Not only can telematics provide you with amazingly detailed and accurate information on your operations, but that information is in real-time, allowing you to make on-the-fly decisions about how best to employ your resources. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that telematics can tell you a lot about not only your operating practices and the effectiveness of your equipment mix, but the individual performance of your operators and managers as well.