8 Reasons to Automate Asset Tracking Tasks

Construction businesses make significant financial investments in the tools, equipment, and machinery you need to complete projects correctly and efficiently. As the saying goes, "you gotta have the right tool for the job."

Unfortunately keeping track of those assets across multiple jobsites and warehouses is a challenge, and all too often expensive items can “walk away” costing contractors significantly. Beyond replacement costs, the real toll on constructions businesses includes lost productivity, increased labor costs, and disruptions to project timelines.

To combat this, contractors must track their high-value, mission critical tools and equipment. But the process can be incredibly tedious, time consuming, and full of human error. After all manually counting items in your warehouse or on your jobsite and trying to document every transfer accurately is a ton of administrative overhead that takes your employees off tasks that push projects forward.

Asset management has always been a challenge. But in today’s landscape—marked by the labor shortage, high equipment and materials costs, and supply chain uncertainty—managing and tracking your assets manually has grown increasingly difficult.

That’s why contractors have turned to automation.

Automation can eliminate repetitive asset tracking tasks provide each departments with the data they need, improving operational efficiency and unlocking better project outcomes.

In this article, we’ll break down 8 ways asset tracking automation helps your field, warehouse, and back-office teams increase productivity to accelerate project delivery and increase profit margins.

What is Automated Asset Tracking?

Automated asset tracking is an easy way to monitor your inventory as it sits or moves between locations. Once seen as a trend, automation technology has become a necessity for many industries. Major players like Amazon, General Electric, Walmart, FedEx, and more have all embraced automation to monitor and manage their inventories efficiently and accurately.

For contractors, there are many asset-tracking technologies available to automate tracking tasks like inventory counts and asset transfers. Here are a few tried and true technologies that we’ve seen work for large and small construction businesses alike:

Finding the right type of asset tracking system for your operations requires some careful consideration; often, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

When choosing the right technology, you should ask yourself:

• What problems your crew currently faces: issues can include frequent tool loss, misplacements, reporting errors, or unavailable equipment.
• What you want to track: decide if you need to track your tools, equipment, vehicles, materials, or all of the above.
• What works with your existing systems: make sure the new technology integrates well into your existing systems and software, such as your accounting or ERP for job cost and billing.
• How easy it is to implement: consider the ease of installation and the learning curve for your workers.
• Your budget and the potential ROI: look at the cost of implementation against the expected savings and productivity gains.

Some contractors may even choose to leverage a combination of technologies. But no matter what you go for, automating asset tracking will always beat cumbersome manual processes for any department. Here’s why:

8 ways automated asset tracking streamlines construction operations and project delivery

Warehouse Teams

Warehouse automation technology adoption is skyrocketing and for good reason. To operate at peak performance, organizations need accurate, real-time inventory data, including which items are in stock, how much inventory they have, and where assets are in the field. Manually gathering this information is not just time-consuming but also prone to error: it is nearly impossible to track inventory accurately via manual processes.  Automated asset tracking, however, eliminates these challenges, offering three huge advantages for warehouse teams:

1. Save time inventorying assets

Warehouse managers spend hours conducting inventory counts every week. But, with automated tools and equipment tracking, this hours-long process can be completed in seconds.

Wireless tracking gateways can scan your entire warehouse from top to bottom multiple times per day. You can also instantly identify inventory in your catalogs to streamline tool check-out processes and know exactly what’s stocked in the warehouse.

These automation systems can run with little to no manpower necessary, giving your warehouse workers more time to work on higher-value tasks like completing pick tickets and preparing deliveries.

2. Improve the accuracy of asset counts and locations, especially when items leave the warehouse

Mistakes happen, but fewer happen when you layer technology into your operations. Automated asset tracking provides precise data on asset counts and locations in real time.

It quickly identifies objects within range so your warehouse team doesn’t need to manually count assets on a weekly basis. And when gateways are deployed on jobsites, you can also maintain visibility to where items are and how many you have in the field.  

With the accuracy of these counts, you can confidently stock your warehouse and distribute tools and equipment across jobsites without the risk of losing assets or over-/under-stocking.

3. Improve field and warehouse coordination

When your tools and equipment are tracked automatically across warehouses and jobsites, it significantly reduces the volume of communication needed, as well as friction between those teams.

Imagine cutting in half the texts, phone calls, and emails between warehouse and field teams, and never needing to chase the onsite foreman or superintendent for a jobsite inventory again. Sounds nice, right?

Automated asset tracking reduces the communication burden and overall friction between field and warehouse teams by providing transparency without the need for site walks to verify what items are on the job.

Field Teams

Automated asset tracking isn't just for keeping tools organized; it saves field crews time and accelerates project delivery. A survey by USG and the US Chamber of Commerce Commercial Construction Index revealed that  70% of contractors believe that advanced technologies, such as automation, can increase productivity, scheduling, and safety. In an industry juggling various complexities, the efficiency gains for field workers translate into two major benefits that help construction companies stay competitive.

4. Save time searching for tools and conducting manual site inventory checks

Nobody wants to play “Where's Waldo?” with their tools on the job site, especially during scorching hot summers when projects are in full swing. When it’s a valuable piece of equipment missing, it can even bring projects to a complete halt. 

That’s why foremen or tool crib managers spend countless hours manually counting every asset onsite. Jobsites can have hundreds of tools and equipment for their workers—some stored away neatly in locked boxes and others misplaced in the middle of a shift. Manually counting and documenting each asset is exhausting.

Automated asset tracking ensures field teams always know where their tools are and no time is wasted counting. Simply tag your assets and scan the job site for them to know what you have and how much.

5. Reduce the risk of theft

Despite the use of tool cribs and gang boxes on jobsites, tools seem to have a bad habit of “walking off” and disappearing forever. Contractors have tried everything to combat theft, even resorting to spray painting their power drills Barbie pink.

But with wireless and GPS tracking, it's much harder for items to walk off the jobsite, especially when location tracking is used in conjunction with check-in/check-out protocols. Wirelessly tracking your items brings visibility to asset locations and can even automatically notify asset managers when your equipment leaves a designated area.

Automation is the best theft deterrent because it creates transparency and accountability, especially when combined with the assignment of responsible parties. By leveraging this technology, you can make sure your tools stay where they belong, significantly reducing losses and improving job site security.

Back Office Teams

One out of every two construction firms report scaling back, postponing, or even canceling projects due to increased costs. The responsibility falls onto the back office. Back-office operations are the backbone of any construction project, managing everything from procurement to payroll. The work is crucial and filled with many tedious tasks that eat away at the team’s time to monitor projects effectively and forecast business needs. However, automated asset tracking can streamline many of these tasks, offering three main benefits to the back office.

6. Reduce asset and labor costs

By reducing tool theft and loss, automated asset tracking helps control operational costs and ensure the money spent on tools and equipment is an investment with a strong return, not a liability that costs more than the revenue generated from those items.

In addition to reducing the direct cost of tool loss - the replacement cost of those items - automation also reduces labor costs by significantly reducing the time workers spend searching for lost or stolen items. For instance, if each worker spends just 15 minutes a day looking for tools, this amounts to a full workweek of lost productivity over the course of a year.  Scaling that across all your crews and projects adds up to significant savings for what is typically your highest variable cost on projects - labor. 

7. Improve the accuracy and efficiency of job costing and billing

With the movement and exchange of assets between the warehouse and multiple job sites, it’s hard to keep track of what assets are on job sites and for how long to feed job costing and billing.

Automated asset tracking eliminates the need to manually transfer assets, improving both the accuracy and efficiency of job costing and billing.

Easily see which assets are on the job and when they get moved so you can accurately charge jobs and have recorded proof to support all of your charges.

8. Avoid project delays and improve profit margins

Ultimately every construction company wants to win bids, complete projects, and make a profit doing so. But construction is complicated and a lot can go wrong in that equation. For the back office, one of the biggest challenges is achieving the visibility and controls from the office to keep projects in the field on track.

Automated asset tracking solves one piece of that puzzle by improving project resourcing with accurate, up-to-date data, so you can get your crews the items they need when they need them to get projects done. Ultimately that translates to fewer site stoppages and project delays, decreasing costs and improving project margins, not to mention happier project owners. 

Automate Your Asset Tracking Today

Automating asset tracking is a strategic move that can save lots of time, money, and headaches across your organization, improving the productivity of your teams so they can deliver better results. From the warehouse to projects in the field and back-office teams, automatically counting and tracking assets solves lots of small problems that cumulatively have a big impact on your business. Given how quickly automation technology is being adopted, those who invest in automated asset tracking now will reap the benefits and be a step ahead of the competition, while those who don't are going to get left behind. 

To learn how Align automates tool and equipment tracking, explore our Wireless Asset Tracking solutions.