You come across them every day. Whether driving along the widened A10 motorway or through an energy-efficient new housing estate in Rijswijk, Dura Vermeer's distinctive green and yellow equipment immediately catches the eye. The construction company, which is more than 160 years old and employs more than 2600 people, is one of the top 10 major construction companies in the Netherlands and is active in residential and non-residential construction and infrastructure. It is known within the construction sector as innovative and sustainable.
Marco Tieleman, site manager at Dura Vermeer, explains how his people run the daily operations with, among other things, the solutions from GPS-Buddy. "All works that we as an organisation commission order their equipment from us. Very simply put, in practice this means that performers log into a web portal and order what they need there. Equipment, by the way, is a broad term; with us it ranges from coffee to housing and from wheelbarrow to crane." This diversity of equipment causes Dura Vermeer to use different billing methods. Consumables such as masonry mortar and cold asphalt, for example, are sold as items. Utility items, such as wheelbarrows, are charged on a 'buy and buy back' basis, and then there is a category of resources and equipment, these are rented.
"For the larger rental items, the service buses and the trucks, we use the solutions from GPS-Buddy. The applications are diverse, from recording running hours, checking customer orders to being able to respond quickly to a breakdown or malfunction. Keeping track of running hours is essential, as maintenance is also linked to this. We also use GPS-Buddy for checking customer orders. If we rent out certain machines and it is indicated that a machine will not be used on a certain day, we will put that machine in park mode on that particular day. By running an I/O report in GPS-Buddy, we can see if the machine is actually unused."
Should a machine be on a job and need to be inspected, the equipment service staff will see the location of that machine in real time in the Studio/web environment or on the planner app. This allows the employees of the service department or inspection authority to go directly to the current location. This ensures high efficiency and minimises the time a machine is idle. In addition, should a machine unexpectedly break down, it is easy to see where the nearest replacement machine is located. Information that is essential to ensure there are no construction delays.
In addition to all these possibilities for preventing downtime and quickly responding to emergencies, GPS-Buddy's solutions offer an additional benefit. In order to bid on projects, it is important to understand its impact on people and the environment. In addition, calls for tenders are increasingly asking what resources are being applied and what equipment is being used, so that, for example, CO2 emissions are minimised. In addition to a transparent overview of the equipment to be used, current distances to a project, it is even possible to administer the trip data of every vehicle that comes to a project via the mobile GPS-Buddy systems. This way, all data affecting CO2 emissions is made visible easily and transparently.