In good times
it’s easy to relax our vigilance and settle for a little slop. Well that kind of
thinking is out the window and it’s time to take a sharper look at our operating
procedures to make sure they’re as sound as they should be.
Under the
Microscope
Even if you’ve
got the newest, most powerful accounting suite on the planet the Software article in our March April 2008 issue
is an excellent primer on the state of the art in accounting. But no matter how
good your office suite is, it has to have good data to chew on … a situation
covered in the well-worn saw “garbage-in-garbage-out.”
This in turn
leads to the recognition that under most circumstances it’s the data collection
and gathering 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 the “Technology in Construction” department of
our February 2008 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.