Equipment360 Helps Drive FCS Construction’s Fleet Uptime to 93%

I'm Shane Whitewood, work for FCS Construction. I'm the Equipment Fleet Manager for the whole company, as far as the assets that we run day-to-day in the dirt. (upbeat music) Equipment is the lifeblood of our company. We are so asset intensive. It's not uncommon to have a million dollars worth of equipment on a 250,000 dollar job or, really, a 100,000 dollar job. As you can see, some of these units are big and they're expensive, but you have to have a water truck if you're in the dirt business. You have to have support machines throughout, other than your core machines, to really make it efficient. When I first came to FCS in 2012, we were significantly smaller and we were able to operate a little differently. We realized, fairly quickly, that we were gonna have a fairly large growth cycle with what was going on in Texas. So, we decided to invest in an equipment software because we needed to be more consistent with what we knew we were going to grow into. With E360, we have an hourly meter reportings everyday. You can go back and hit Edit Meter and see what you did, so you can tie that to the hours that were recorded in a heavy job for the day. You can see where your utilization was idle time, run time, possible work time, all of those things. And you can get quite accurate. Our utilization rate is around 93 percent. Uptime, the best we can figure. I'll you that we really couldn't measure it before, like we can now. So the most valuable part for E360 for us is keeping track of PM services. We are religious at how we bring the hours from the machines into 360 automatically, and set alerts so we don't miss those PM services. And then we have manners set in order to get those scheduled efficiently, get 'em completed efficiently, and then get the information back, as far as oil samples, efficiently. All of which can be found in 360 by serial number in the documents area. So that's, I'd say, by far the most important aspect. In our company, we have a guy that monitors the alerts for PM services on the machines through E360. And he basically, when alert pops up, he then, opens a work order, schedules that service with the vendor that we have contracted to do that service. That vendor, then, completes the service, closes the work order, Keith puts it in E360, closes it with those hours, resets the alerts, then I get the oil samples that come from that service, and I analyze them to make sure the machine is performing like it's supposed to. It doesn't have any compartmental issues. Those documents, they're are all loaded into the document portion of E360. Brian uses E360 to keep track of actual mechanic work is done on machines and loaded. So most parts that you buy from vendors come with a warranty, so if he loaded it into 360, he could go back and look and say, "Oh yeah, this thing." Even though we paid for it, not knowingly, Shane can go back and get us a credit based on what we had stored here in 360. So, not only, maybe that saves time, but it also could save you money. So E360 worked really well for us because when you entered complete machine information under the general category, you then had all of these different tabs for that machine, specifically, without having to jump around. It was easy to use, it was easy to read. It was easy to import stuff, it was easy to export stuff, it was easy to print reports. So, as going through the training, it kinda sealed it up as, "Hey, this is something we know we can use." Without a doubt, Equipment360 has saved us a lot of time, in many different categories. There's three people in our company that touch E360 on a daily basis. And all three of us are more efficient based on the information that we're allowed to enter, find and utilize in that software. Since, really the last three years, Equipment360 has been pretty much everything to me. It allows me to go to one source and find pretty much everything I need to operate, as far as keeping the fleet going. But it is a very, very viable tool in helping keep track of a 150 unit fleet for maximum operation time. (upbeat music)