Bouygues’ equipment and plant arm in France, Bouygues Construction Matériel, is implementing real-time asset tracking of its 20,000-strong fleet.
Omniscient, a start-up incubated by Bouygues SA, has designed a turnkey solution for its backer’s plant business, allowing it to use Omniscient’s site operations optimisation platform for data collection and analysis. The project involves around 100 employees being assigned to monitor the equipment on more than 1,000 sites, spread over five technical bases.
To meet the challenge, Omniscient specified Abeeway geolocation sensors, optimised for long-range, low-power wide area network system. Connectivity is supplied by Bouygues Telecom subsidiary, Objenious, which can connect equipment in isolated and difficult environments, including inside buildings and deep basements, at long range.
According to Omniscient, a Bouygues fleet manager can navigate on a virtual map and view, in real time, the location and tracking sheet of each piece of equipment, including, among other things, the site configuration of the equipment, as well as links to the quality control sheets.
Using the information from Abeeway’s sensors, Omniscient’s algorithms can calculate various fleet management performance indicators, including equipment turnover and utilisation rates, inventory by technical base, inventory by worksite and number of billable days.
Bouygues projects direct annual savings of 5% to 10% on maintenance and fleet management and a return on investment of three years. The project should make the billing process easier, allow better allocation of unused equipment, and provide more reliable monitoring of equipment life cycles.
Patrick N’Kodia, director of Bouygues Construction Matériel, said: “[This project] enables us to achieve two types of gains in parallel: first in the optimisation of intrinsic management performance within the Matériel structure with traceability and visual indicators in real time; and second by providing the [civil engineering arm of Bouygues] with additional levers for action on their use [of equipment] on site thanks to configurable alerts. It is therefore a win-win situation in terms of productivity.”
Image: cranes at work on a Bouygues site.
