Seamless Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Construction and Facility Management
Combain’s advanced indoor and outdoor positioning technologies are revolutionizing asset management, workforce management, and operational efficiency in the construction and facility management industries. By utilizing real-time location tracking, organizations can improve asset utilization, ensure workforce safety, and monitor project progress, reducing costs and increasing profitability.
Common challenges such as lost tools, misplaced equipment, inefficient workforce management, and costly project delays can significantly affect a company’s bottom line. Combain positioning solutions can deliver a tangible return on investment (ROI).
Asset Tracking and Management
Reducing Lost Time and Equipment Costs
Tracking equipment, tools, and materials can be challenging in large-scale construction projects and facility management operations. Workers often spend excessive time searching for assets, leading to project delays, wasted labor hours, and costly replacements.
A seamless positioning system can provide real-time visibility of tools, machinery, and materials, ensuring availability. By equipping high-value assets with Bluetooth or WiFi tracking tags, companies can pinpoint their locations indoors and outdoors, eliminating wasteful inefficiencies.
Real-World Scenario
A construction company managing multiple projects faces challenges with misplaced tools, which leads to frequent work stoppages. Workers often traverse large job sites or make unnecessary trips to storage areas to find missing equipment. However, after the company implements an indoor-outdoor positioning system, it can locate tools instantly, significantly reducing downtime.
Industry Insights and ROI Estimations
According to For Construction Pros, workers spend 10% of their working day searching for tools and attachments (ForConstructionPros, 2023).
Assuming a company has 50 workers, each working 8-hour shifts, the calculation shows the following:
- Daily hours lost: 40 (50 workers × 0.10 × 8 hours/day).
- Annual hours lost: 10,000 hours (40 hours × 250 workdays).
- Total annual financial loss: $500,000 (10,000 hours × $50 average hourly labor cost).
- Efficiency Improvement: Assuming a 50% reduction in time spent searching for tools
Implementing a tracking system that costs $100,000 annually reduces asset search time by 50%, generating $250,000 in annual savings.
ROI Calculation for Asset Tracking
A 150% ROI in the first year shows that asset-tracking solutions quickly pay for themselves while greatly enhancing project efficiency.
Workforce Safety and Efficiency
Minimizing Injuries and Liability Costs
Construction sites and extensive facilities pose significant safety risks, including accidents involving heavy machinery, falls, and unauthorized access to hazardous areas. Ensuring worker safety is a top priority. Seamless positioning technology can assist in tracking worker locations, enforcing geofencing restrictions, providing real-time alerts, and enabling quicker emergency responses.
Real-World Scenario
A facility management company that manages high-risk maintenance can implement positioning technology, such as smart trackers in worker wearables, to track employee locations. In a fall emergency or with the push of a personal alarm button, supervisors can quickly locate and assist affected workers, reducing response times and enhancing overall safety compliance.
Industry Insights and ROI Estimations
According to KPA.io, the average cost of a lost-time injury is approximately $35,000. Assuming five such injuries occur annually, the total annual cost is $175,000.
Implementing a positioning-based workforce tracking system costs $50,000 per year, and assuming that companies can reduce the number of incidents by 50% leads to annual savings of $87,500.
ROI Calculation for Workforce Safety
The system provides a 75% ROI in the first year and significant worker safety and compliance enhancements.
Monitoring and Utilization Analysis
Preventing Costly Delays
Large-scale projects frequently experience unexpected delays caused by inefficient workflows, scheduling conflicts, and issues with material delivery. Positioning technology enables managers to monitor the movements of the workforce and assets. This ensures that resources are used effectively and helps address bottlenecks before they become more significant problems.
Real-World Scenario
Construction companies often face project overruns and misallocated resources. By implementing a positioning system to monitor workers’ real-time locations and asset utilization, they can analyze movement patterns and identify areas where inefficiencies lead to delays. This insight allows for improved scheduling and coordination.
Industry Insights and ROI Estimations
As stated by Construction Executive, project delays can lead to an additional cost of 5-10%. If delays incur $200,000 each year, employing progress monitoring technology for $75,000 annually and assuming that this reduces these delays by 40%, resulting in a savings of $80,000 annually.
ROI Calculation for Progress Monitoring
While the first-year ROI is 6.67%, its long-term benefits include fewer delays, improved efficiency, and better project predictability.
Conclusion
The Business Case for Positioning in Construction and Facility Management
Integrating seamless indoor and outdoor positioning systems in construction and facility management is not just a convenience but a financial necessity. This technology offers significant benefits, including:
- The 150% ROI from asset tracking reduces lost tools and wasted labor.
- 75% ROI from workforce safety solutions, minimizing injury-related costs.
- 6.67% ROI from progress monitoring, preventing delays and inefficiencies.
Beyond these impressive numbers, positioning technology enhances workplace safety, increases productivity, and optimizes asset usage, leading to sustainable and long-term operational improvements.
As the industry shifts towards digital transformation, investing in real-time positioning solutions ensures that companies remain competitive, cost-effective, and prepared for the future.
Next Steps
To get started, contact us to schedule a consultation. Learn how Seamless Indoor and Outdoor positioning can empower you.
Precise positioning of assets and personnel in indoor and outdoor environments ensures total visibility and minimizes downtime.
Flexible and cost-effective solutions for positioning in construction and facility management by using WiFi, Bluetooth, and Cell ID-based positioning. This method significantly decreases the need for large infrastructure investments.
Implementing Combain-based positioning in systems like Traxmate enables automatic monitoring of workforce safety and asset usage, helping managers prevent costly incidents and delays.
Combain provides cloud-based and on-premise solutions, enabling businesses to easily scale their positioning systems and integrate them with existing IoT and tracking systems.
Project considerations
- Use long-life battery-powered tracking devices
- Re-use existing infrastructure of Wi-Fi access points
- Complement infrastructure with long-life battery-powered Bluetooth beacons
- Place trackers on equipment, tools, and wearables
- Combain positioning solution works seamlessly indoors and outdoors
- Combain can provide 3D indoor positions with building, floor, and room accuracy
Find assets all over the world
Global Outdoor geolocation with Combain ́s Positioning Solution
Cell-ID positioning
Cell ID location services are used to determine the location of a mobile device by identifying the cell tower to which it is connected. Common use cases for cell-id location services are emergency services, asset tracking, marketing, logistics, security, navigation, and more.
Using cell-id as a complement to GPS is a good alternative when you need energy efficiency for long battery lifetime of trackers or devices.
Companies require knowledge of the location of their devices to conduct asset or security checks. While GPS is the conventional method used for this purpose, it can be expensive and lead to rapid battery drainage. Moreover, GPS is limited by line-of-sight, rendering it ineffective for locating devices in enclosed spaces such as buildings. However, since high accuracy is not always essential for various business purposes, alternative solutions to GPS are required.