Sherwood Construction Connects Mixed Fleet Telematics Data for Better Operations

For Sherwood Construction, a company spread across four states and with a mixed fleet of over 500, consolidating telematics data from all equipment OEMs into a single view was critical. Enlisting the help of Teletrac Navman, the company transformed its maintenance operations and gained greater insight into asset utilization.

Managing a mixed fleet

With Caterpillar, John Deere, VOLVO and Kamatsu equipment, Sherwood had plenty of data, but no fleet-wide view. Data was spread across each OEM’s own telematics platform and reported on in different formats. They turned to the Teletrac Navman solution suite for construction, which follows the Association of Equipment Management Professionals’ (AEMP) Telematics Standard, to aggregate all equipment data in a single interface. Now Sherwood can easily view equipment location, service meters, hours, idling vs. production time and more at a glance.

"What really pushes you to telematics is the data. The data you can gather is just amazing." - Doug King, Corporate Equipment Manager

Improved maintenance

Keeping Sherwood’s maintenance team of 62 on the same page is critical, especially as they coordinate across over 15 job sites. Corporate Equipment Manager Doug King is the main user of Teletrac Navman, but the equipment and trucking superintendents, regional managers, shop foreman, field service coordinator and, soon, technicians all have access. GPS tracking has made maintenance more efficient with real-time location data to ensure technicians and mechanics are assigned jobs efficiently, and they hit all equipment that needs service in a given area. It’s also improved track maintenance – one of the fleet’s biggest expenses. Up-to-the-minute views of service meters are much more accurate than paper logs and ensures undercarriage checks are timely.

Hours of Service compliance

While the FMCSA provides a few exemptions or exceptions to certain HOS rules for CMV drivers in the construction industry, ELD and HOS compliance remains critical. Sherwood relies on Teletrac Navman DIRECTOR for easy compliance, electronic logging and real-time insight into driver hours.

Better resource planning & bidding

With aggregated OEM data, Sherwood can understand efficiency of entire jobs. On one site, it measured Volvo articulated dump trucks’ cycle time – distance from loading to dumping, time at the dump site, time to travel back to the loading site and time it took to load. Comparing that to the trucks’ onboard scale systems, it could see the site was running efficiently. This informs more accurate bidding and staffing for future jobs.

A surprise savings of over $160,000

Every construction company worries about equipment theft. When it happened to Sherwood Construction, thankfully the GPS tracking provided by Teletrac Navman led them and the police to the exact barn their stolen loader backhoe was in as well as the location of another stolen skid steer. These would have cost over $160,000 to replace and, according to Doug King, Equipment Manager at Sherwood Construction, recovering either by itself would have paid for the entire technology system, not to mention the operational and efficiency gains it provided.