Providing every stakeholder with an integrated operating system will make our job sites run more efficiently.

Brian Giamo is CEO and co-founder of Activate, a B2B SaaS company enabling co-equipment management for OEMs, dealers, rental companies, and their customers. He was previously the CEO of Channel Economics, a consulting firm that designs, develops, and implements go-to-market strategies and solutions. Brian played college football at William & Mary.

By Brian Giamo

A job site is an ecosystem; all the moving parts are connected. This is true whether you’re a general contractor building a residential highrise or an aggregates company working within a quarry.

When something goes wrong with a single piece of equipment, it can throw off the entire workflow of the job site. Our job sites – and bottom lines — are suffering because of it.

Unplanned downtime costs companies upwards of $50 billion every year, according to data from Emerson Global and the Wall Street Journal. As you may guess, equipment failure is the biggest culprit, causing 42% of this unplanned downtime.

The key lies in catching potential issues before they cause equipment failure. Fleet owners and equipment providers could unlock cost savings and unrealized revenue opportunities. So how can we make this happen?

That’s where the concept of co-equipment management comes into play. Co-equipment management is defined by fleet owners, dealers, rental companies, and OEMs joining forces to maximize the uptime, performance, and productivity of every piece of equipment on a job site. This requires alignment between every party, as well as technology that helps increase communication and visibility over equipment needs, without upending the existing tech systems in place.

Co-equipment management will help keep each piece of equipment in production — which in turn means the ecosystem stays humming. Let’s discuss the underwhelming status quo and examine how the reality looks different once true co-equipment management is unlocked:

The Status Quo: Equipment issues cause ripple effects throughout the job site (and beyond).

Let’s start with a scenario: an operator conducts their daily walk-around inspection on an excavator.

They notice some sort of minor issue with the excavator, which they document on their paper inspection form. The operator drops the inspection form in the cab of the excavator, and no one else — not the job site super or the provider — has any idea of that potential issue. They might make disparate attempts at communicating via text, phone call, or email, none of which are logged or tracked.

Or maybe they log the issue in some sort of application, but it gets lost in a sea of other platforms. If the super is walking the site or dealing with an issue, he might not notice the updated information.

Later in the day, something goes wrong. The excavator stops working. The super is furious because he didn’t find out about the issue until the breakdown. Now the super contacts the dealer, who’s racing against time to fix something that’s already holding up the entire ecosystem of the job site. The dealer is caught flat-footed, and now the super is getting frustrated with the service provider and the equipment itself. 

With the job site on hold, money’s being lost. The contractor’s CFO is noticing a hit to the bottom line. Suddenly, a single equipment issue has impacted P&Ls, job costing, the dealer’s customer experience, and perceptions of the OEM brand.

Surely, there’s a better way — and it starts with the right technology.

The Future: Increased visibility and communication benefits operators, job site staff, and equipment providers.

It takes a village to raise a piece of equipment. And it takes technology to keep that village on the same page.

Operators are already dealing with a host of platforms for telematics, fueling, timecarding, etc. Those platforms are vital, so we shouldn’t be trying to replace them. We should be trying to connect them.  

Imagine if every platform you used to keep track of your equipment was connected within a single operating system. You’d have a single pane of glass to view all of your equipment, regardless of brand or type. All of that valuable data would be put to use.

Let’s reimagine our excavator scenario. Once the operator notices an issue in the morning, they can log it in the OS. The super and the dealer are automatically notified. Dealers can arrive quickly for a routine repair, realizing extra service revenue while avoiding a more catastrophic breakdown. The super gets his equipment up and running quicker, and doesn’t have to deal with long-term headaches.

Our CFO isn’t worried, and the OEM keeps its brand reputation intact.

Co-equipment management is the future of our industry.

Every role on a job site is interconnected. We deserve technology that matches that connectivity.

When we maximize the uptime, performance, and productivity of our heavy equipment, everyone wins. Operators keep their job sites moving, dealers profit from proactive maintenance, and OEMs deliver a better customer experience.

When it takes a village to raise a piece of equipment, we also need to keep the village on the same page. Co-equipment management — backed by the right technology — will help us do just that.

Want more? I recently sat down with the Voices of Construction podcast to discuss why co-equipment management is the future. Listen here.