On site machinery and trucks location

Real time mobile Apps

90% of the work on site for a production manager is about logistics. The remaining 10% is to pray that it won’t rain.

In the activities of earthmoving, cast in place concrete pouring or road paving it is fundamental to know how many trucks and machines we have, where they are and where they are moving to.

In case of concrete, for instance, it is crucial to know if the next concrete tank is in the plant, has already left, or its estimated time of arrival. As for the land moving, we can ask ourselves how many times a truck passes by a given spot: this way we will know its number of daily trips and we will detect variations in the cadence of the cycle

Today there are several mobile applications able to solve these issues in real time (Glympse, Wave, Life 360…). Their operation is simple, and they do not require more devices than the common spreaded smartphones: they place on a map the location of other devices.

We can simultaneously select different contacts that we have stored in the mobile, as long as they agree to share their location with us. For example, through this application the site manager can know the location of the different concrete trucks that serve a particular pit, or the operator of a backhoe know how many trucks are about to arrive at the loading spot.

Some of this apps, like Glympse (see image above) have programming environments for developers. You can extend its utility by using computers and export data to other platforms. For example, you could get schedules with the internal and external land movement over a month.

Bottomline: if you still do not know how many trucks there are in your cycle, put the blame on you!