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Asset Tracking with ToolWatch

Q. Ahead of our demo with ToolWatch, I was hoping to get some feedback from anyone who currently uses, or has looked into, ToolWatch for company-wide asset tracking. Any thoughts, deployment challenges, alternate solutions?
Keith Murley
Schimenti Construction Company

A. We have been using ToolWatch since probably the mid to late 90s. Back then we were on their client/server software, now we are on Enterprise, which is essentially cloud based. (They don't support the other version anymore.) It's been so long that we've been using it, that I don't know much about alternate solutions, but I will say it has been working out great for us. When we converted to Enterprise, we didn't opt for the "training" that they were pushing, as we had already been using the other system for so long, we didn't feel we'd need it. While for the most part that was true, there were a few things that required support calls to figure out, as they worked slightly different in Enterprise, and at that point anyway there was barely any product documentation, so there was really nowhere to get an answer besides support. Since overall the process stays the same, I haven't checked to see if it's any better now, it just works for us so there's been no need to check.

Obviously one of the worst parts of getting going is the actual engraving and barcoding of everything that you want to track (your initial inventory). It is time consuming and tedious. After that, it is a great system. For tools that we only own a few of, it's easy to find out where one is if it is needed elsewhere. It highlights tool hoarding so you can try to change it, not that it always works (some people just feel the need to have every possible type of tool in their possession "just in case"). For tool thefts, it allows us to report to police/insurance exact model numbers with serial numbers of what was stolen. Twice already it has been our detailed information that has led to specific identification of stolen tools, one led to the takedown of a massive tool theft ring, the other is still under investigation, but may be related to a large jobsite hit where everyone's storage container was broken into and raided during off hours. Barcode labels that are purchased from ToolWatch are non-duplicated, so if I purchase a sheet of labels with 123456 on it, nobody else gets that same number. So, a call from law enforcement to ToolWatch with a suspected stolen tool will lead them to us (this has happened before).

It does require periodic inventories of transfer locations (jobsites, vans, etc.) in order to pick up on the occasional person-to-person tool swap where it doesn't get recorded - we do one once a year over the span of about a week to try and re-sync anything that has gone unaccounted for. Overall, the fact that people know you're aware of what they have, I believe, has been a deterrent to things "just going missing" on jobs - people seem to feel more accountable, and our actual tool loss has diminished greatly. Especially for small ticket items like cordless drills - before Toolwatch, we'd be buying half of them new ones for every job we did. Now, for the most part, they all come back.

We also keep track of our tool maintenance in Toolwatch, to see if we've spent enough on a tool over the years to justify scrapping it. We also keep track of not just tools, but just about anything we hand out to an employee - credit cards, phones, computers, etc. It has the ability to export a "rental charge" to a jobsite, which can then be imported to a job accounting package (actually this is one way to try and prevent tool hoarding, by making employees accountable for the charges being posted to their jobs). We don't use this feature, and never have, so I don't know how hard it is to set up. It would involve coming up with a rate for every tool type that you have in the system, though.

Although we are not using the export costs feature to "bill" tools to jobs, I know it allows you to create an export template, so if Viewpoint allows importing costs, I'm sure you can create an export template to match.
Pasi Nurminen
Nurminen Construction Corp.