What to consider when evaluating asset tracking software for your fleet

How to evaluate asset tracking software

Is your fleet looking for an asset management solution to help track its valuable assets and improve the efficiency of your company’s workflow?

Whether you manage a fleet at a small business or larger company, it’s likely you depend on some mix of heavy and light-duty equipment to meet business needs. This means losing or misplacing an asset can be a huge cost for your company, not to mention a large inconvenience for day-to-day operations.

To help alleviate the risk of asset mismanagement, fleet managers can use an asset tracking system to gather valuable insights into their large and small assets—like location and utilization data—that drive efficiency across their complete asset mix.

What is asset tracking software?

Asset tracking software refers to a type of software that helps businesses track assets like equipment, tools, or IT assets—such as company-owned smartphones—in real time.

While there are various asset management software in the market, they often require manual processes. For example, barcode asset tracking systems require you to use a barcode scanner to record barcode labels on manual excel spreadsheets. Barcode scanning is often error-prone and time consuming, making it difficult to keep track of a vast asset fleet. Similarly, asset tracking solutions such as QR codes or radio-frequency identification (RFID) may also be inefficient.  

For the fleet industry, innovative organizations are leveraging cloud-based asset management technology, helping provide more visibility into the whereabouts of high-value powered and unpowered equipment, including trailers, dumpsters, and shipping containers. Asset tracking software can also be used to locate smaller equipment, such as generators, pumps, fiber spools, bins, porta potties, skip loaders, and more.

In addition to location information, cloud-based asset management systems also gives fleet managers and authorized team members the ability to log in to a centralized database to look up information about their assets no matter where they are. This means fleet managers and authorized team members have access to continuous asset data, regardless of if they’re working from the company office or a remote job site.

Three ways to use an asset tracking solution for your large equipment fleet

An asset tracking solution can help a business in a number of different ways, but there are three major benefits the software can provide fleets on a daily basis:

1. Real-time location tracking

Asset tracking software gives fleets real-time visibility into asset location via GPS asset tracking. Plus, with the ability to create customizable geofences—or virtual borders around an area—fleets can rest easy knowing that their assets are exactly where they’re supposed to be or get notifications with geofence alerts if they’re not. This can be particularly helpful if a fleet manager wants to be able to detect stolen equipment or unauthorized use even when he is not on site.

2. Inventory management

Automate your fleet’s inventory tracking with asset tracking software by easily searching for equipment by location, name, type, or a custom field. This granularity helps give fleets visibility into their entire asset inventory from a single dashboard view and allows fleet managers to check in on assets from remote locations. Fleets can also use this asset location data to gain more inventory control onsite. Fleet managers can eliminate yard hunts by providing yard spotters with the exact location of an asset or capitalize on unexpected but lucrative loads by immediately seeing if an asset is in range and available for a requested job.

3. Improved utilization

Assets are expensive to own and manage, especially when factoring in maintenance and storage costs. That’s why it’s important for fleet managers to understand how each asset is measuring up against its potential. To help fleets drill down on this information, certain asset tracking solutions offer insights into exactly how an asset is being used. For example, Samsara's Utilization Reports show usage by segmenting assets by type, location, and date used. This can help fleets streamline asset ratio and even grow revenue by redeploying underutilized assets to areas with higher demand.

How to protect smaller equipment with asset tracking software

Though small assets and tools are critical to an organization’s efficiency and operational success, their compact size makes them particularly vulnerable to theft or misplacement. In fact, up to 30% of annual tool purchases are attributed to theft, loss, and damage. By protecting small equipment, organizations can reduce downtime and ensure employees can work at peak productivity.

Today, real-time asset tracking software enables organizations to track and locate small, mission-critical assets with ease. Small asset tracking devices such as the Samsara Asset Tag leverage bluetooth technology, as well as an industrial network made up of millions of devices, to provide full visibility into equipment location. Here are three benefits that an asset tracking solution can provide an organization:

1. Minimize job disruption and downtime: Equip field employees with the necessary tools they need to operate efficiently. By monitoring essential assets required for job completion, organizations can prevent delays and protect revenue.

2. Reduce theft and recover valuable assets: With a small, discreet, ruggedized tag, organizations can reduce the time spent searching for key assets, and lower the overall resources needed to locate equipment in the field.

3. Streamline audits and inventory management: Leverage real-time data to accurately track asset inventory, make informed write-off or purchasing decisions, and simplify the equipment audit process.

How do I choose the right asset management software?

The best way to decide on the best asset tracking software for your fleet is to determine what level of visibility your business needs and choose a solution accordingly. But if you’re still unsure, here’s a checklist of important questions to consider when evaluating a system:

• Size of asset tracked: What is the size of the equipment you are monitoring? Are they large assets such as a container, water tank, fork lift, or trailer? Or are they smaller assets such as toolboxes, lawn mowers, or laser level? Can the technology partner you choose provide tracking for both large and small assets?

• Quality of location data: Would your asset inventory benefit from real-time equipment tracking or is a single location ping every five to ten minutes sufficient? Additionally, would it be helpful to have the option to switch between real-time or interval alerts?

• Ease of use: How straightforward and user-friendly is the asset tracking dashboard, and will it require a heavy-lift to onboard and train employees to use it? Does the asset tracking software offer a robust open API ecosystem, enabling seamless integrations with other mission-critical applications for your operations?

• Customer support: What level of customer service and technical support will your team require? Is it important for your team to have access to a team via a mobile device, mobile app, or digital help desk?

• Ease of install: How seamless will the install process be for your large fleet and small equipment? Will it require hiring additional people or new resources?

• Battery life cycle: How are the asset trackers powered? Is the battery lifespan in line with your business needs?

Real-time asset tracking for large and small equipment with Samsara

Samsara offers customers real-time asset information, unlike many asset tracking solutions that provide breadcrumb-style trails with location updates that refresh every several minutes. And with live-to-the-second tracking, fleet managers have the flexibility to either have real-time location information or be alerted via ping at specific intervals.

For large equipment, Samsara’s Asset Gateways use Bluetooth to connect with Samsara’s sensor system, creating a complete asset tracking solution in a single platform. Whether you’re looking for ways to collect asset data or need a tracking platform to keep an eye on equipment, Samsara’s Asset Gateways can provide valuable information for both your powered and unpowered assets. And with their compact size, Samsara Asset Trackers can attach to almost any piece of equipment and are built to go everywhere your equipment goes.

Cable East leverages Samsara Asset Tracking to protect their assets and reduce costs. Samsara was instrumental in daily location checks of Cable East’s 400+ assets, providing the fleet management team with crucial GPS location data. By tracking their fleet of equipment, Cable East ensured they had the assets they needed to complete each job.

Over the course of four years, Cable East recovered $2.5 million worth of assets, which would have been permanently lost without Samsara. "I can physically put my hands on $2.5 million in assets that we never would have seen again without Samsara," said Billy Porter, Director of Risk Management. “These recoveries were a direct result of the enhanced visibility and monitoring capabilities provided by Samsara.”

For small assets or tools, Samsara Asset Tag uses the Samsara Network—a Bluetooth-powered network that consists of data from our extensive number of Vehicle and Asset Gateways that use the Samsara platform—to gain real-time visibility into equipment location. With Asset Tag, organizations are able to prevent theft and loss of small physical assets, reduce downtime, and streamline inventory management. 

DeSilva Gates uses the Asset Tag to add a layer of protection to their most high-value assets. By discreetly embedding Asset Tag as a backup tracker to existing Asset Gateways, they now have real-time visibility into their small assets, enabling effective tracking and recovery of stolen assets. With the enhanced tracking capabilities, DeSilva Gates is not only able to deter theft but also improve inventory management—enabling them to improve efficiency and better protect their $200 million equipment fleet.

"Asset Tag allows us to reinforce existing location tracking on our high-value assets and, for the first time, add tracking to smaller assets that we couldn't track before,” said Rich Poppoff, Equipment Superintendent.

If you’d like to learn more about how Samsara can help you protect your large and small assets, dive into our Asset Tracking solution and connect with our team today.