Good management and maintenance of your tools is crucial for every construction and installation company. But with a lot of work on different sites and constant deadlines, it is difficult to keep an overview of your tool inventory. In this article, we take a look at the five biggest challenges of tool management and how you can tackle them effectively.
Many companies in the construction or installation sector with different technical teams on the job struggle to manage their tools. A lot of tools are lost, not maintained or left unattended on a site.
5 challenges of traditional tool management
1. Wrong data
An inefficient inventory tool such as Excel is often the root of poor tool management. Don’t get us wrong, Excel is excellent software, but not for inventorying your tools. The information in Excel is not reliable because human errors can quickly creep in and because the data often does not correspond to reality. So you are never sure about the exact location of your tools.
As a result, employees have to look for the right tools and they lose valuable time. There is a chance that the missing tool will be lost for good, resulting in additional replacement costs.
2. Time consuming
Traditional tool management requires employees to manually check in and out each tool. This again gnaws at the productivity of your team. How long does it take to find and check out ten different tools, for example? Many employees see it as a waste of time and do not see the point of it, so they ignore the administration. The result: the log of your tools is polluted again in no time.
3. A lot of tools disappear without a trace
Because the log data is not accurate, you can never be sure where tools are located. It is passed on from one team to another, it is “briefly loaned” to another contractor at the site, it is forgotten on site at the end of the day,… Losses happen quickly. Plus, without a real-time logging tool, employees are never sure about the exact location of your tool, so they don’t feel responsible for putting it back in the correct location.
4. A lack of maintenance
Proper maintenance of your tools ensures that it functions as it should and that it lasts longer. So it contributes to productivity on site and saves costs. However, many construction tools are never maintained because nobody has an eye for them. For example, no one knows if and when the last service took place.
5. No theft protection
Every year, around 3,000 thefts are recorded on construction sites in Belgium. That means 8 a day. The risk of site theft is greatest at night, during the weekend or during construction holidays. The damage can quickly add up to several thousand euros per theft. It also leads to work delays because your employees no longer have the right tools.
If you are not sure what exact tools were on site, it will be difficult to get them back or turn to your insurance company to cover the loss you suffered.
Tool tracking: always a view on the location of your work equipment
There is a simple way to know exactly where your tools are at any time. With the tool tracking solution from HeronTrack, the management of small material and equipment for workers of construction and installation companies becomes much easier.
We provide all your tools with a smart sensor that communicates with the smartphone of your employees via Bluetooth. In this way they find all the tools on site and nothing gets lost. The information about your tools is also shared over the public network. This way you always have an overview of the availability, location and last user (s) of your work equipment, wherever you are.HeronTrack also helps you to organize the mandatory inspections of your work equipment in an efficient way. The digital log helps you to prove the good condition of your tools.
Want to try the tool tracking solution from HeronTrack for free?