What fleet GPS and telematics installs actually look like once you get past the brochure: dirt, grease, tight schedules and machines that were never designed with a tracker in mind. These are real jobs our crews have done across the eight states we cover.
The job: telematics gateways on skid steers, dozers and cranes for one of the big national telematics providers, on machines working in South Carolina and North Carolina.
A pickup truck has a dash, a fuse box and a diagnostic port in roughly the same place every time. Heavy equipment doesn't. Every machine is laid out differently, and the hardest part of the job is finding a usable spot to mount the gateway: somewhere protected from the knocks the machine takes all day and where it can still get a signal. On a crane, a skid steer and a dozer, those spots are in three completely different places.
Then there is the dirt. These machines live in mud, dust and hydraulic grease, and every panel you open has a layer of it. You can start the morning in a clean uniform and finish the day looking like you crawled through the machine, because you did. That is the part of heavy equipment work most installers don't want, and it is why a lot of it goes undone or gets done badly.
Once a gateway is on a machine and reporting, the owner can see things that used to take a phone call or a drive to the jobsite:
None of that works if the gateway shakes loose, loses its power connection or sits where it can't get a signal. On heavy equipment the install is what decides whether the data can be trusted.
The job: GPS telematics on 70 vehicles for a city in South Carolina, removing the previous provider's devices as we went.
A city can't park its whole fleet for a day, and this one could only spare 10 vehicles at a time. So the job was split into seven visits, ten vehicles each, and every visit was a full swap: out with the old device and its wiring, in with the new one, then checked before the vehicle went back into service.
Swaps take more care than a fresh install. Old devices are often spliced into wiring nobody documented, and leaving those splices behind is how a vehicle ends up with electrical problems a year later. Taking the old system out cleanly is half the job. You can read how we plan bigger rollouts like this on our fleet installation page.
The job: 50 GPS installs for the military, about twenty years ago.
Before telematics, our work was car audio and dealership installs. GPS tracking was around, but most businesses hadn't heard of it yet. A job doing 50 GPS installs for the military changed that. It showed the work was steady, needed no inventory sitting on a shelf, and was simpler work than what we had been doing. We have been installing fleet tracking ever since.
Common questions
Yes. We've installed gateways on skid steers, dozers and cranes, working on site wherever the machines are.
Yes. We schedule in batches around the vehicles you can spare, the way we did with a 70-vehicle city fleet in seven visits of ten.
Yes. We take the old devices and their wiring out cleanly in the same visit, so nothing is left spliced into the vehicle.
Trucks, equipment or a whole city fleet, across eight states. Call or text 803-513-1009.
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