Tenna has announced the release of three new products to support contractors’ ability to monitor inventory of parts, hours of labor and the costs associated with each in relation to their equipment maintenance management.
The three new software solutions are designed to support construction equipment maintenance management, including Cost Codes, Mechanic Time Card and Parts Inventory Management. The purpose of these products – which, like all of Tenna’s vertically integrated platform, are designed to work together – is to enable flexibility and visibility around costs associated with repairs, inventory and labor management.
“At the end of the day, these products will help construction businesses analyze true data around owning, operating and maintaining their heavy construction equipment, so they have visibility into how they are spending time and money around maintenance activities. This insight can help them consider ways to optimize their owned fleet and make better buy/sell decisions,” said Austin Conti, co-founder and CEO of Tenna.
Cost Codes
Using Cost Codes, contractors can discover how much time and money they are spending on repairs and damages by associating custom cost codes (directly aligned with their ERP or accounting systems) with their Preventative Maintenance services, Maintenance Requests, Work Orders and Mechanic Time Cards within Tenna. This helps facilitate the classification of costs and track spend against labor and materials.
“Building off Tenna’s existing Maintenance and new Mechanic Time Card products, Cost Codes will allow contractors to track internal and external spend on parts and labor against repairs and other routine equipment maintenance,” said Jose Cueva, co-founder and VP of product at Tenna. “Allowing Tenna users to create and maintain their own custom codes provides the opportunity to align with their existing ERP or accounting system and manage costs between their two key systems cleanly.”
Tenna designed the Cost Codes structure to be custom-built per account and flexible up to six levels deep, allowing contractors to choose how to report on costs related to time, adding parts, etc., and enable personnel to code. This product is permission based for control and, like the overall Tenna platform, is not restricted to a number of users. All employees with login access to Tenna can leverage this functionality without an additional cost. Cost Codes provide an understanding of maintenance finances with cost tracking.
Mechanic Time Cards
Tenna’s new Mechanic Time Cards allow mechanics to capture their time against work orders and maintenance requests. With these flexible digital records, labor is recorded under individual costs in Tenna and can be used with the payroll system. This solution is for contractors with their own shops to track labor performance and distinguish between overhead and actual time worked on an asset. They are also for those who may involve apprentice mechanics and would utiilize multiple levels of approvals. Tenna supports up to three, with flexibility for a single, global approval if desired.
Tenna’s Mechanic Time Cards are flexible for managers to configure.
Managers can create custom timecards for the entire crew. They can set class codes to identify classes of work, set labor cost and billing rates for each, define interval configurations and time types such as standard, overtime, lunchbreak, etc., require one or multiple levels of approval and more. “This will make a difference for contractors because it’s up to them how detailed they want to be in breaking down tasks,” said Cueva.
E-signatures, digital clock out and a simple interface embedded into maintenance requests and work orders (available on mobile, tablets and web browsers) make it possible for mechanics to capture time and submit without leaving the maintenance section of Tenna. Users can also cost code individual time entries based on their configurations. If a mechanic is working on a repair for half a day and that repair needs to be cost coded specifically, and in the afternoon they are doing cleanup work in the yard or something else, they can choose the right cost code and bill-to information," explained Cueva.
Not only does Tenna’s Mechanic Time Card solution enable controlling costs by understanding the time and labor associated with frequent tasks, it also provides insights into mechanic performance and helps construction businesses capture how much something costs to repair and maintain.
Parts Inventory Management
Tenna’s new Parts Inventory Management product makes it possible to organize tracking for parts, helps schedule preventative maintenance based on part availability and provides control over inventory issues that can delay projects. With Parts, contractors can manage inventory, warranties and costs associated with parts they need and/or regularly use. Managers can see a list of parts added to a work order to track spend against that work and see what parts have been used historically for each asset in their fleet.
The Parts Catalog is a centralized, smart database of all the parts contractors care to keep reference of. Whether they keep parts in stock or buy on-demand, contractors want to have a centralized, correct part for each item allowing them to buy at the right price and from the right vendor across their organization. Tenna enables contractors to add multiple optional data points in the Parts Catalog.
When it comes to Inventory Management for contractors who do inventory parts in one or more shop or warehouse locations, they can maintain visibility in Tenna for parts in stock and track them, their individual prices, vendors and details by location while keeping the part number intact to remain centralized in the catalog. They can also capture transactions in Tenna when a part is added or subtracted to or from a Tenna work order, maintenance request or asset directly and users will be able to see how many they have in-hand.
Other elements of the Parts product include seeing suggested parts for maintenance requests mechanics are assigned to alongside the parts they have added to a work order already and measuring the life of a part committed to an asset in time or utilization. With this visibility, contractors can track how much time or how many hours or miles a part has been living on an asset, giving clear records about when, for example, a tire was replaced in terms of date and how many hours or miles were on the machine, alongside whether or not it is still under warranty based on when the tire was added and how much it drove.
"This information further assists the contractor by giving them the ability to capture the average lifetime of a part, and to compare which brands or types of parts live longer on an asset on average than another, which is a unique insight," said Cueva.
Tenna’s Parts product leverages its base platform telematics offerings to measure the life, warranty and wage of individual parts.
