For main contractors building plants, terminals, substations and oil and gas infrastructure: in the Sumgait Chemical Industrial Park, in the Alat Free Economic Zone, in the industrial parks of Karabakh and on sites far from any town. Machines work on a rota, coverage is not available everywhere, and several contractors are on site at once.
Industrial construction differs from housing in the scale and the mix of plant. Crawler cranes of 100 tonnes and more, bulldozers and excavators on earthworks, pipelayers, piling rigs, fuel bowsers, crew buses and diesel generators on the temporary power supply. Part of the fleet is your own, part is hired and part belongs to subcontractors.
The client, often an international company or a large state operator, requires reporting on plant and safety in its own format. Meanwhile the project manager wants to understand something simple: what he is paying for and why the programme is slipping.
We set monitoring up so that it works in these conditions: with weak coverage, on machines of various makes and years, and with access separated between contractors. General solutions for the construction industry are on the telematics for construction page.
On many sites there is Azercell, Bakcell or Nar coverage, but it is weak: down in the excavation, behind an embankment or in the far corner of the site the signal disappears. The tracker does not stop during this. It writes points and events to memory, tens of thousands of records, and sends them to the server as soon as it catches the network. In the reports the track looks complete; the data simply arrived late.
Where there is no signal at all, two things help. The first is an external aerial on the cab roof: often that alone is enough to make the connection steady. The second is a satellite channel for critical events. We fit that only to machines where a delay of several hours is unacceptable, crew buses for instance, because satellite traffic costs noticeably more.
Before any fitting starts we drive round the site and measure the signal from all three operators. That is half a day's work which saves months of argument about tracks with holes in them.
The further the site is from the office, the more decisions are taken on the spot without oversight. The same problems recur from project to project:
A night shift, a fuel bowser, a dozen bulldozers and tippers. Without fuel level sensors nobody can say how much diesel left the perimeter.
Scheduled servicing is skipped because there is no time for it just now. The crane's engine fails at the height of the erection work.
A bulldozer levels a plot for a neighbouring farmer or takes somebody a load of soil at the weekend.
The subcontractor invoices for idle hours caused, he says, by the main contractor. There is nothing to confirm or refute it with.
The operator presents a personal card or key, and only then can the engine be started. On a large site this solves two things at once: nobody without authorisation ends up at the controls of a crane, and every hour worked is tied to a particular operator for the timesheet and for pay.
Start prevention and remote relay control are described on the remote engine immobilisation page.
Until the site is connected to the grid, the power comes from generators: for the site accommodation, the lighting, the welding, the pumps. They are filled from the same bowser as the plant, and the consumption is written off as actual.
We fit a fuel level sensor in the tank and a running sensor on every generator. Within a month it becomes clear how many litres per engine hour each unit uses under real load. A generator running round the clock at 20% of its capacity is reason to rethink the power supply arrangement. A sharp drop in level at night with the generator switched off is reason for a different conversation.
If the generators stand far from the plant and from coverage, their data is sent in the same way as the plant's: accumulated and transmitted when the network appears.
On an industrial project the main contractor usually wants to see all the plant on site, including the subcontractors' machines. The subcontractor, on the other hand, does not want to reveal his whole fleet, only what is working on this project.
In Wialon this is handled through access rights. Each contractor sees his own machines. The main contractor sees every machine within the project geofence. The client receives consolidated reports without access to the detail. It is just as convenient to pass data into the client's own system where that is required.
The utilisation report shows how much plant was actually working and how much was standing. For the project manager that is an argument in the discussion about whether another unit needs to be hired. There is more in the fleet utilisation section.
On an industrial site how quickly monitoring goes live depends less on the equipment than on organisational matters. Those are best closed off before the contract.
A pilot is conveniently run on 8 to 15 units: your own heavy plant, a couple of generators, a fuel bowser and one subcontractor's machines. The duration is a month or more.
What is needed from the main contractor: a site layout with the zones, a list of plant with makes and years, the client's reporting requirements, a contact in the safety department for site access, and the timesheets and fuel issue records for the pilot period.
Acceptance criteria, for example: data from the far parts of the site reaches the report, even if late; engine hours and work under load have been reconciled with the timesheet; fuel issued from the bowser has been reconciled with the increase in the machines' tanks; the subcontractor's plant is visible in the system to the agreed extent; the client has received a sample report in their own format.
Signal measurement, a list of plant with makes and years of manufacture, the client's reporting requirements. At this stage it becomes clear where CAN is needed and where separate sensors are.
For heavy plant we usually fit an industrial tracker with several CAN interfaces and RS-485, such as the Teltonika FMC650. For generators and lighter machines, simpler models.
We work on the machines at the change of shift or during a service. One team equips 3 to 6 machines a day depending on the set of sensors.
Plant timesheet, fuel, engine hours, idle time, breaches. We set up distribution to the project manager, the mechanic and HSE.
Once the project finishes, the equipment is removed and moved to the next site, while the history stays in the system.
Drains from machines and generators are visible by time and place. On our remote site projects this is usually the quickest saving to appear.
Idle time, hours worked and trips are backed by tracks and sensor data rather than by the two sides' word alone.
Servicing by running time and fault notifications reduce the number of breakdowns at the busiest point of the work.
Card-based authorisation to operate plant, SOS and speed monitoring on crew transport.
Case studies from “Construction & Infrastructure”
Agriculture, construction and mining
Agriculture, construction and mining
Agriculture, construction and mining
Send us an enquiry and we will price it up for your fleet and pick the hardware for this sector: construction & infrastructure.
A specialist calls back and asks about the vehicles, how many there are and what you need to keep an eye on.
We propose the hardware and the features, and set out the one-off and the monthly cost separately.
At your yard or at ours, on a schedule that keeps the vehicles working.
A specialist will call back and match a solution to your fleet and your task.
