ABCs of Tool Tracking Technology

Accountability, Beacons, & Comprehensive Solutions: ABCs of Tool Tracking Technology

Losing or misplacing expensive equipment and tools (and repeatedly rebuying them) is a serious issue in the construction industry. Compromising productivity, wasting time, and costing money, the end result is a direct hit to your company’s bottom line. In order to protect your investment in tools, minimize unnecessary tool replacement, and improve operations, you need an effective tool tracking solution. But, with new kinds of tool tracking technology hitting the market, it can be tough to know where to begin. Sometimes a simple, high level view can help. To get you started, we’re sharing the brief ABCs of modern tool tracking technology:

Accountability

Things are not the way they used to be. Unless you’re a single-man operation, gone are the days of just keeping your tool shed organized and remembering who borrowed your table saw. When you have multiple field teams on multiple job sites using hundreds of tools and costly equipment it is hard to keep track of everything. Check-out spreadsheets and the honor system likely stopped cutting it a long time ago. But, the “who is responsible” piece of tool tracking remains a foundational component of an effective tool tracking solution. Assigning responsibility to a person — and giving that person the ability to accept the responsibility — injects accountability into the tool tracking process. Thankfully these in-the-field responsibility transfers can be made quickly and easily on smartphones and tablets. They are the core of an accountability-based tool tracking system like ShareMyToolbox. When everyone knows who is responsible for each tool, you reduce loss and “mysterious disappearances.” When tools stop disappearing, you stop chasing and replacing them. When you stop chasing and replacing tools, you save time and money.

Beacons

But what about the beacon-based technology we’ve seen rolled out in the industry? That’s a worthwhile question. The GPS and Bluetooth beacon technology sounds promising, and the future of this evolving technology is exciting. But, while beacons can offer valuable information about the location of a handful of your tools, countless issues arise when you try to deploy hundreds, even thousands, of beacons. This sort of tracking technology makes sense for the large, high-end vehicles and equipment fleets you have deployed on job sites, but it’s just not practical for the multitude of other smaller tools that leave your warehouse.

Comprehensive Solutions

So, how to proceed? Consider a multi-layered tool tracking approach. Start by implementing an accountability-based tracking solution like ShareMyToolbox as the foundation of your tool tracking strategy. Then, layer a GPS or Bluetooth based tracking solution as an extra safeguard for your large, high-end inventory of equipment. This comprehensive approach to tool tracking doesn’t just rely on hardware (beacons), but rather, it also addresses the crucial worker-centric issue of responsibility. This comprehensive solution effectively improves the entire process of organizing, finding, and tracking tools.

Learn more and get started with accountability-based tracking solutions at www.sharemytoolbox.com/tool-tracking.