When contractors talk to heavy equipment manufacturers and their dealers about improving productivity, efficiency or safety on their jobsites, new machine technologies are often the hot topic. What can sometimes be overlooked are the support services that enhance the performance of these machine technologies.
Well-built machines are a good start, but when you combine valuable services with them, you get a truly complete solution that helps you gain a competitive advantage.
Here at Volvo, we like to say the appropriate services plus the suitable machines equals to best solution. That’s why we’ve worked hard to develop new services that not only help customers get the job done, but get it done faster, at lower cost, and with maximum uptime.
From productivity and site optimization to workplace connectivity, check out these four new Volvo services designed to do just that.
Connected map
Increasing the efficiency of transportation operations can help reduce travel times, minimize mixing of materials, reduce fuel consumption and reduce emissions. To do this, you need a better view of your production flows, and Connected Map allows you to see on a digital map where all your machines are located in real time. And not only machines, but also other vehicles and pedestrians. You can use it with Volvo machines, machines from other brands, pedestrian phones and on-site vehicles.
With Connected Map, all machines and vehicles can see each other, and you can see what the site actually looks like from a computer in the office. You can see roads, points of interest like a break room or an office, loading and dumping areas, etc. The map can be viewed from the machines or from the office.
If you have a bottleneck in a certain area of your site, your site manager can redirect traffic to reduce downtime, for example. A bottleneck could be trucks waiting in line to load or poor road conditions causing delays.
Connected Map can increase your productivity and increase safety and awareness on site. You can set up restricted zones and speed zones, and you can have your Volvo machines automatically slow down to the set speed limit. You can have a speed zone that covers the whole site, or just a small area where there are people walking. Simply create the map from the Office Portal, which is very easy to use.
For site administrators, the Office portal makes managing larger sites easier and even creates the ability to manage multiple sites simultaneously. Office Portal not only provides an overview of all machines, operators and temporary site visitors, but also allows your site manager to react to site conditions. Your site manager can introduce measures such as one-way traffic or restricted zones and communicate these changes to all users in an instant helping to improve awareness, reduce accidents and increase productivity.
Performance indicator
If you want to get more detailed data about your production, the performance indicator is a great tool to consider. It uses on-board weighing and other machine data to send machine performance indicators to the portal. This allows you to optimize on-site operations by gaining a visualized overview of production, fuel efficiency and machine cycle data. Using a real-time dashboard, you can easily compile and modify data according to your needs.
Speed and location are obtained from the machine via Connected Map. For Volvo machines with Co-Pilot and Onboard Weighing, production data is captured automatically.
With Performance Indicator, you can visualize your operations with clear and easy-to-create dashboards, assess whether production is on track, and be alerted to any production or operational issues so you can take appropriate and quick action if needed . When you reduce guesswork and any inadvertent confusion, you can make better decisions to improve efficiency and productivity.
Load output connected
We talked about Connected Map and how it lets you see how material moves around a job site. But what happens when you’re loading material to move off-site, like an over-the-road truck at a quarry, for example?
For these types of sites, we offer Connected Load Out. Connected Load Out is designed to improve the efficiency and productivity of the loading process by connecting the loader operator, the site office and the trucks. It is a digital solution for Volvo wheel loaders with on-board weighing and loading assistance and for Volvo excavators with on-board weighing Dig Assist.
Connected charging makes it possible for truck drivers on the road to place orders from a phone app and communicate directly with the loading machine via the app. Once the order is placed, the machine will see an ETA of the truck and can plan the work until the truck arrives on site.
For example, if the machine operator sees that there are 10 more minutes until the next truck arrives, the operator can leave the stack and do some cleaning between trucks. It makes workplaces less stressful and helps you feel much more organized.
All loading tickets are stored digitally and you can save a lot of time by planning your loading work.
head of tasks
If you oversee large jobs such as infrastructure projects, we can also help you improve your productivity. The Task Manager is a tool that helps you visualize the progress of your big projects. Data can be accessed from any device, anywhere in the world. For example, if you’re preparing land and need to move large amounts of material, you can set goals in the app and all machines on site can work toward the same goal.
This tool helps you with the planning aspect and you will see in advance if you will be on time or if you will be late. Many tasks on a jobsite depend on each other, so it is essential to be able to plan well when dealing with a large number of machines and with many companies involved in the same project. The task manager is a great tool for this type of user. Works for any brand of machine. If you have a Volvo machine, it will be a more streamlined experience for your operators, but if not, you can also run it from a mobile phone.
It works in real time as long as you are in a place with a decent internet connection. If you are in a patchy area, you don’t have to worry about losing data. If you lose your Internet connection, all data is stored on the machine until the next time you connect it.
Task Manager is suitable for everyone from production managers and site supervisors to subcontractors, all of whom play a vital role in keeping infrastructure projects on target. Data can be filtered by different time periods, projects, activities, materials or work orders, providing real-time updates and facilitating status update reports to management.
These four new services, unveiled at CONEXPO 2023, are just the beginning of our commitment to continue to offer new ways to help you run your business as efficiently and productively as possible. They are valuable additions to existing services, such as Site Simulation and ActiveCare Direct, that many customers have come to rely on over the years to improve the way they run their businesses.
To find out which of our services can help you improve productivity, efficiency and safety, and ultimately your bottom line, talk to your local Volvo dealer to find out which of these services they currently offer.
