Tool Tracking White Paper - Sponsored Whitepaper

In today’s business climate there is constant pressure on business owners to run their businesses more effectively and cut costs in their business operations. There are many areas to consider cutting costs in a business including lowering financing costs, reducing manpower, reducing fixed costs as well as other areas including day-to-day operational costs. Operational costs are those costs incurred daily in support of providing some sort of billable service to your customer.

You’ve heard the phrase “the tools of the trade”. This phrase emphasizes the necessity of having more than just the skills of the worker to complete a project. In a service based industry such as construction, the tools are the actual physical tools used to build the buildings or repair equipment or tear down buildings, whatever the business mission. If a service-based business does not have the tools and equipment available at the right location it can cause another delay that may result in penalties and additional cost to the business.

Why aren’t those tools available or where they should be? Many reasons can be found. No business owner wants to think about their employee or employees as being dishonest and walking off with business assets but it does happen. Maybe the tools or equipment just got left behind on the last job and disappeared? Maybe the employee placed the tool in the van and forgot to return it back to the service depot. Maybe the equipment failed on the last job and is awaiting maintenance back at the shop. Maybe the purchasing person is not aware that more tools are needed to support the increase in business. As a business owner or operations supervisor I’m sure you can think of many reasons a job being not completed on time due to unavailability of equipment.

All of the above problems can be attributed to “lack of control”. You can’t control what you don’t know. If you don’t know precisely what equipment you have and where it is, you don’t have control of your tool assets. Many businesses are now automating tool management activities by using proven tracking technologies. Choice and use of these tracking technologies should be researched prior to deciding on an automated tool management system. This paper addresses the different types of tracking technologies and the considerations to be made when choosing them.