Coates, Australia’s largest equipment hire and solutions company, is developing a range of complementary technologies to help customers improve productivity and efficiency on construction sites or during planned shutdowns and plant maintenance.
Telemetry is a key focus, with the company currently installing a newly developed retrofit telemetry device across its eligible fleet to capture vital data on the location and utilisation of equipment.
Following the success of this technology, Coates has turned its attention to Smart Site, an IoT-enabled productivity tool that helps customers optimise tool time efficiency by providing live visibility of assets and people.
With a pilot program currently underway, Coates plans to officially launch Smart Site to customers in key market sectors, including Mining, Oil & Gas, Power, Manufacturing, Construction and Infrastructure, towards the end of the first quarter of 2022.
Here we take a closer look at the benefits of the Smart Site technology.
What is Smart Site?
Smart Site is an innovative productivity tool available exclusively to Coates customers that aims to increase productivity by reducing wasted time and movement around a site. Smart Site is part of Coates’ mission to use proprietary technology to add value beyond equipment hire.
How does Smart Site work?
Smart Site uses a combination of technologies, such as RFID (radio frequency identification), LoRaWAN (long-range, low-power wide-area networking) and GPS, to create a geographically specific network around the perimeter of a site. Customers can then track and study personnel and tagged equipment within that area to find new project efficiencies.
Neil Moore, Coates Product Specialist, explains, “Customers can create geozones inside these networks to isolate key locations on site. This information allows customers to measure the amount of productive time spent in predetermined work zones and the amount of unproductive time spent outside of these zones.”
What are the benefits of Smart Site?
Locate Equipment
Smart Site allows Coates customers to quickly and accurately locate smaller high-value tools and equipment not fitted with a telemetry device. Live visibility of equipment during a project means customers can redistribute or off hire underutilised equipment, thus improving productivity and reducing hire costs.
The system can trigger alerts when tools or equipment leaves a geofenced zone. This helps reduce the cost of lost, misplaced or stolen tools and equipment when maintenance or construction projects close out.
Improve Productivity
For industrial customers, the costs of an unproductive workforce can quickly add up. Smart Site uses smart badges (which don’t require personal information to protect employee privacy) to produce time and motion studies and identify productivity roadblocks.
“There is a considerable opportunity for Coates customers to improve on tool time by understanding where the productivity roadblocks are, and which processes need to be refined,” says Neil.
By understanding these factors, Smart Site helps Coates customers maximise the time their workers spend in productive areas with a tool in hand, performing actual maintenance work.
Safety
Smart Site also helps manage safety incidents by allowing customers to set parameters that send an alert when a staff member remains stationary for a pre-determined period. Customers can also set up alerts triggered by unauthorised access to restricted areas.
Smart Site was recently used to assist a customer monitor social distancing on their job site. For example, if a COVID-19 outbreak occurs, the proprietary technology allows customers to quickly and easily determine who may be at risk of exposure.
To learn more about Smart Site and the company’s other proprietary technologies, contact the Coates Industrial Solutions team.
