The Wall Street Journal article spotlights Topcon asset management technology
The Wall Street Journal, one of the world’s most prestigious
publications, recently examined remote asset management technology for
the construction industry that not only monitors how machines are being
used (and sometimes abused) but also can help slash energy costs, and
determine machine location as well as prevent theft.
Topcon was
listed as a company that develops and sells the technology and
monitoring services to the equipment manufacturers and directly to
equipment owners.
Heavy equipment manufacturers -- including Gomaco, Komatsu,
John Deere, Caterpillar and Case New Holland, among others -- are
installing more of the monitoring devices using wireless communications
and GPS technology to gather and transmit the data from as close as a
job site office to as far away as the other side of the world.
Topcon has two distinct information collection, detection and analysis systems: Topcon Tierra and SiteLINK 3D.
SiteLINK
3D is a real-time, advanced, localized communications management system
for its 3D machine control line of products. With Topcon Tierra, a
company has available data via a web portal on every machine in a fleet
on every job site regardless of locations.
Ray O’Connor, president and CEO of Topcon Positioning Systems (TPS), said, “With SiteLINK
3D and Topcon Tierra technology, a company has control over time,
control over productivity of machines and their operators, and control
over data, from first cut to project analysis.”
Taking
one simple function of a remote asset management system – monitoring
machine idle time – can save a company thousands of dollars a year in
fuel costs, a major consideration when fuel costs are high, as well as
reduce emissions for a positive environmental impact.
Manufacturers are constantly coming up with ways to use data gathered by asset management systems like SiteLINK
3D and Topcon Tierra, not the least of which, O’Connor said, is to
“monitor an operator and how he handles his machine and to literally
improve the operators’ behavior to maximize machine efficiency and
reduce costs and increase a company’s profit.”
