Mobilizing and dispatching equipment is part of every contractor’s daily routine. While current construction technology has made the process of managing equipment and other asset resources more efficient, a complete and thorough solution for construction resource management and scheduling—requesting, approving, dispatching, forecasting, etc.—has yet to avail itself to contractors … until now.

Inefficiencies With Traditional Construction Resource Management

People in the field, shop and office are all part of the logistics process including the movement and use of equipment across operations and business locations. Equipment managers have lacked an automated process for telling people what they need to do and where they (and their assets) need to be.

Field personnel—operators, drivers, laborers, supervisors, crew leaders, etc.—have similar problems: They get a piece of paper, text, call or email about where to go next, usually lacking details or notification when things change. Without clear direction and regular updates, their days become chaotic and frustrating.

For project teams, equipment request forms or site mobilization and equipment lists typically exist on paper or as informal emails or templates. Once filled out and submitted to the shop/yard manager, they often will not get confirmation about their requests. This leaves them in the dark about when resources will arrive onsite or if they have been delayed.

It is also key for operations and project finance personnel to see existing equipment schedules and upcoming project needs to help determine their two- and four-week lookaheads and forecasting for other projects. Without visibility, they face curveballs around available resources to outfit their projects and risk operational delays.

What Contractors Need in a Resource Management and Scheduling Solution

Two major aspects are needed in a construction scheduling and dispatching solution:

• Automation to replace inefficiencies created by human-error-prone, paper-based methods; manual uploading; and missed or infrequent phone calls.
• Clear visibility into requests, statuses, schedules, updates and key details in one single view.

The trouble with existing resource management systems on the market is that they are not built for construction workflows with use cases for all the relevant users. Many existing products are siloed in ways that most inputs are analog, offline and/or manual and only cater to one user type.

For example, dispatchers still need to collect requests received from the field via paper, phone, text, email or custom form for assets and labor resources. The rest of the team—drivers, site supers, project managers, etc.—cannot access the dispatcher's system, so they are unaware of decisions being made, making the dispatcher a bottleneck. Usually only the people physically sitting behind the dispatcher's screen have the full picture.

Even systems that are mostly digital and provide easier visibility to the field often create silos internally—requests on one screen, maintenance on another and schedules on yet another. The need to toggle between them can make it easy to miss crucial details before approving requests, resulting in unexpected delays and lost time and money. And none of these systems make forecasting simple, resulting in time-consuming work prone to errors for finance and operations executives.

Tenna’s New Resource Management and Scheduling Functionalities

Tenna proudly introduces its new Schedule functionality as a companion product to Resource Management, which launched earlier this year. While Resource Management enables contractors to efficiently request and dispatch equipment and labor resources, Schedule allows for visibility of these resources across divisions and jobsites in a single combined calendar/Gantt chart view for equipment and labor planning and forecasting.

The availability of these construction planning and scheduling functionalities within a single platform is a major competitive differentiator in today’s construction technology marketplace; without it, contractors are limited to using multiple separate tools to achieve visibility and scheduling efficiencies. Tenna’s design and development of Schedule gave way to a flexible, customizable and consumable format holistically, which brings ease of use and further value to the product for the everyday user.

With the addition of Schedule, equipment and project managers can see what is down for maintenance, what is currently operating on a particular site and what is scheduled for six months down the road for a job. They can look back at project and asset history as a reference to compare against their construction forecasts, including how long machines were in use on jobsites compared to where they were scheduled.

See It in Action