A water truck rolls into a remote construction work site only to find out it won't be needed for another week. "Didn't they tell you the schedule changed?" the project manager asks the driver. "You'll have to call dispatch to find out where you're supposed to go."

In the immortal words of Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate. Although many a contractor will vouch for the truth of those words, nevertheless, some have a narrow view of two-way communications. They think of it in terms of a telephone call between two people, such as a project manager and a subcontractor on a road-paving project.

While that's true, two-way communications can be much more than that. It also can occur between computers, machines or pieces of equipment. Regardless of what, or who, is on the sending and receiving end of the line, there's no question that two-way communication channels significantly increase contractor productivity. For instance, two-way communications create more efficient operations that result in profit margin improvement. It improves maintenance scheduling, thus keeping expensive downtime to a minimum, not to mention that better communications takes the guesswork out of the bidding process.

Today, several major developers of sophisticated communications equipment are focusing on construction applications. One such company is QualComm, which gained its experience over 16 years in the trucking industry. Now it has expanded that know-how to construction contractors, their trucks and equipment, according to Tim Lewis, QualComm's senior director of business development, construction equipment in San Diego.

In a recent interview with CTQ, Lewis noted, "Like the trucking industry, when you enter a construction dispatcher's office, it's pandemonium. People are screaming and yelling, phones are ringing off the hook; there are Post-It stickers being moved around a board as people try to keep track of equipment and trucks and projects. However, with today's communications technology, dispatch offices now have only a couple of people in the room — not 10 — to keep on top of everything. The phone may ring only occasionally, and that's generally from a customer who could find the answer to his question online, if he knew where to look."

To get to this level of sophistication, said Lewis, "we spent a lot of time with contractors determining their work flow, what their hours are, what their problems are, and how we can solve them."

What QualComm learned right up front, he said, was that contractors want to reduce equipment costs — all equipment, including construction trucks. To do that requires improvements in the company's maintenance program. "When you get down to it," Lewis said, "a contractor's work is just a hole in the ground. He doesn't care what equipment is used to do the job. He just wants the job done. And the way to reduce equipment cost is to have a good preventative maintenance program in place."

Without such a program, a contractor will over-service or under-service a project, Lewis commented. Both are bad practices. If you over service, you're pouring money down a drain. If you under-service, which is more often the case, you run the risk of a breakdown, and that's the worst thing that can happen. "You can be down for hours, or for days," he remarked. "When that happens you then have to rent a piece of equipment — if you can find it — and each day you're down costs anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000, depending on the job and the equipment. With the right communications system, however, you can get your arms around costs like that. A good communications system, such as our GlobalTracs, tells the equipment manager, among many other things, when it's time to call in a vehicle for servicing."

Another benefit is that it tells contractors when to pull a piece of equipment off one job and move it somewhere else. "This is the biggest issue by far, getting trucks and equipment where they are needed. You can measure what vehicle is really working," Lewis said. "If you have someone on an asphalt paver and it's operating 16 hours a day, then you know you're getting work out of that machine. But if it's idle much of the day, then something's wrong. You can pull it off that job and place it at a site that needs it."

Having construction trucks and equipment properly placed has another benefit. "You can charge for the job sooner and avoid profit erosion at the end of the project," Lewis said. "That happens to everybody."

He explained: "Sometimes after a project ends you realize some guy had only 15 minutes with an excavator. Whether he did or not is irrelevant. All of a sudden a profitable job becomes unprofitable. It may even go negative, as often times it does."

To avoid this, he said, a good communications system lets you look at all your equipment. You might see that half of it is being utilized as it should be, but the other half is being under-utilized. "You move that under-utilized equipment off that site and place it where it's needed. Don't take it for six months and use it only for two weeks."

That procedure, he said, results in fleet cost reduction and even a reduction in the fleet itself. "All in all," he commented, "a good communications system can save a lot of things: it can reduce fleet cost, reduce daily cost, reduce profit erosion, reduce under-utilization of equipment, and it's an independent way to see when the job starts and stops. Being able to manage a job remotely with the equipment you have is a big deal," he said.

Another benefit is this: By knowing how much a piece of equipment is actually used on a given job, you won't lose money the next time you bid on a project.

Sophisticated systems aside, however, there is still an inherent efficiency in any straight forward, two-way communications setup, such as group calling, according to Jennifer Weaver, spokeswoman for VerizonWireless in Phoenix, Ariz.

"Many times there are changes in plans, there are site delays, deadline changes, and the contractor needs to get that information out to the right people as quickly as possible," she remarked. "Essentially you can do this by a simple group conference call. As recently as a year ago VerizonWireless designed a cell phone for that purpose. The service is called 'Push To Talk.' It's a phone that has the push-to-talk capability. It looks like a regular cell phone. There's a button on the side that contractors use to do two-way calling. You push the button to talk, it goes out to the group and you release the button to get a response."

By using the VerizonWireless website, a contractor can list the phone numbers of everyone who needs to be contacted, locally, regionally or nationally.

Said Weaver, "You don't have to go through customer service or anything to set this up. You enter these numbers yourself. This is a key feature. You can add or delete numbers as you see fit." Setting up such a two-way communications link is a simple process, she said, and doesn't require any special training.

The Push To Talk technology is one of the results of a $4-billion investment the company makes each year in its network, according to Weaver. "We do this to make sure contractor calls go through every time and that the equipment is always reliable, no matter if the call is local, regional or coast to coast."

For contractors who are considering improving the two-way communications within their own company, Weaver has a few simple guidelines. She said:

Make sure the wireless company has the two-way capacity. Some don't offer this service.

Take a look at the strength of the network that backs the service because you won't be any more efficient if the call doesn't go through.

Make sure the company you're considering offers service in the area where you operate.

Look at different equipment and calling plans as well as business pricing. If a contractor has five or more lines, Weaver said, under VerizonWireless he qualifies for business pricing plans. There could be a savings under business pricing, but the exact cost depends on how many lines and what kind of equipment is used, she said.

At QualComm, Tim Lewis offers a word of caution to contractors who may be in the market to upgrade their communications system.

It is a buyers-beware marketplace, he said, and contractors should know that. "There are a lot of companies that sell equipment that works on networks, but they may not be around very long," Lewis said. "I'm not talking about reputable companies like VerizonWireless or Sprint or ourselves. The reason some of these networks won't be around very long is simple inexperience. Many OEMs, for example, after spending millions and millions of dollars, have gotten in the market, and then gotten out. The reason is it's not their core competency."

He added, "I would recommend that contractors team up with somebody they can relay on who has the infrastructure, the scope, and the financial and experience capability to give them what they need. Don't go to John's Bar who runs a network out of his garage," he said. "He might not be here tomorrow."