Construction equipment tracking that wakes you at 23:14
Already running Yipii in Malta and Gozo
Where a construction fleet gets away from you
A mini-excavator sits on a site in Mosta for three weeks. Nobody is sure whether it is still needed there, the hire company is still billing for it, and on Monday morning it is gone. Construction fleets are harder to track than delivery fleets because the machines never come back to a depot at the end of the day, and the expensive ones are not vehicles at all: attachments, generators and tool packs that live in the back of a van.
Plant theft
Machines are left on unsecured sites overnight and at weekends. The first anyone knows is when a crew turns up to work and the machine is missing, and by then the trail is two days cold.
Idle plant nobody reclaims
A machine finishes its task and stays where it is. On hire that is a daily charge for an asset doing nothing. Owned, it is the machine you hired a second one of because nobody knew you already had one free.
Attachments and tools walk
Breakers, buckets and generators move between vans without a record. They are too small for a hardwired tracker and too valuable to keep replacing.
Disputed time on site
A client queries an invoice for eight hours of plant time. You have a timesheet and they have a doubt, and nothing else.
From the yard gate to the message at 23:14
One machine, one site, one week. Read the clock times as an example. The order they come in is what repeats on the next job.
- 106:40
Out of the yard
The low-loader leaves with the excavator on the back. Crossing the yard geofence tells the foreman the machine is on its way, so he stops ringing the driver to ask.
- 207:15
Offloaded in Mosta
The excavator enters the site geofence. That crossing starts the clock that turns into the hours on the client's report at the end of the week.
- 312:00
On the live map
The site manager filters the map to the Mosta asset group. Three of the four machines are working. The fourth has not moved since 09:00, so it goes to the Naxxar job on Thursday instead of a hire company sending a second one.
- 419:30
Site closed
Everyone has gone home and the unauthorised-movement alert is armed on every asset on that site. It only fires outside working hours, because a site that alerts every morning as the crews legitimately arrive gets muted within a week.
- 523:14
The ignition comes on
The excavator starts. Yipii sends an SMS and a WhatsApp message immediately, with the live position and a share link the manager on call opens in a browser with no login. Recipients are set per alert, so whoever is woken at 23:14 does not have to be the person who reads the Friday report.
- 6Friday
With the invoice
The scheduled report arrives by email: hours on site per machine, per job, for the week. It exports to PDF or Excel, so it goes out with the invoice rather than after the argument.
What you pay depends on how many vehicles you run and what you fit to them. Tell our Malta team both and we will quote it.
Ask for a quoteWhat construction equipment tracking in Malta runs on
All of this sits on the same account and the same map as your vans, so the plant is not a second system for somebody to log into.
- GeofencingA zone per site and per yard. Alerts fire on inside or outside, and crossings become the history you export.Yipii IoT
- ReportingStops, idling and point visits: which machine sat where, and for how long. Standing still fires nothing.Yipii IoT
- Asset TrackingPlant is set up as equipment, so an excavator, a generator and a low-loader share one list with their own trails.Yipii IoT
- MaintenanceService schedules, work orders, parts and inspections, scheduled by distance or by date rather than by engine run-time.Yipii Mobility
Alerts, geofencing, reporting, beacons, asset tracking and the live map are all part of Yipii IoT, the core tracking account. Servicing is the one thing on this page that sits outside it. Email alerts cost nothing. SMS and WhatsApp draw 1 to 3 credits a message, which is why most sites keep those for the night ones.
Included with Yipii Mobility, the add-on that extends your IoT account. One subscription covers everything in the app, so no feature here is sold on its own. What Yipii Mobility includes
What a machine needs before any of this works
Being straight about this saves everyone a difficult conversation later. The 23:14 alert works because the tracker sees the ignition come on, and seeing ignition means a wired install. Any machine with a permanent 12 or 24 V supply takes a hardwired Teltonika unit, fitted by an auto-electrician and tucked behind a panel where somebody looking for a plug-in dongle will not find it. Attachments get beacons instead. Every site gets a geofence drawn on the first morning of the job.
- Hardwired install by an auto-electrician, on any machine with a 12 or 24 V supply
- Teltonika first. Cellocator Pointer still reports position and ignition, but it is discontinued with no SMS and no diagnostics, so plan on replacing them
- Bluetooth beacons on breakers, buckets and generators, read at roughly ten metres by a tracked vehicle
- Ten minutes at the start of each job to draw the site boundary. A yard wants 100 to 250 m, and a quarry gets a polygon
- Servicing runs on distance or date. There is no engine-hours schedule behind it
The sum, with the assumptions showing
There is no industry-standard number for what tracking saves a construction fleet, and we would rather not invent one. What we can put on the table is the arithmetic. Change an assumption and the figure changes with it.
One mini-excavator not stolen, at replacement value. It happens once, not every year.
You only find out this row was right by never needing it.
| Lever | Assumption | What it comes to |
|---|---|---|
| One machine theft avoided | Replacement value of a mini-excavator at €18,000, with the insurance excess and the days of downtime left out of it | €18,000, once |
| Idle plant off-hired a week earlier | Hire at €120 a day, 5 days recovered, 6 times a year | €3,600 a year |
| A duplicate hire not taken out | One machine reassigned instead of hired in, 4 times a year at 3 days each, on the same €120 a day | €1,440 a year |
The first row is a single avoided theft rather than an annual figure, and we left the excess and the downtime out of it instead of inflating the number with them. Illustrative arithmetic, not a measured customer outcome.
Frequently asked
The tracker sees the ignition come on. Your unauthorised-movement alert is armed outside working hours, so it fires. Yipii sends the message to whoever you named on that alert: email is free, and for this one most sites add SMS and WhatsApp, because nobody is reading email at that hour. The message carries the live position and a share link, which the person on call opens in any browser without a Yipii login, so they can watch the machine move while they are on the phone to the police. Two honest limits. The alert is a notification, not a ticket, so nothing opens a case, nothing records who responded, and there is no acknowledge button. And the whole thing rests on the tracker seeing ignition, which means the machine needs a wired install.
Up to a point, and the point is worth knowing before you buy. A breaker or a generator gets a Bluetooth beacon, and a beacon is read by a tracked vehicle within about ten metres of it. Yipii shows the item as a portable: an asset with no tracker of its own, located by whichever vehicle can currently see its beacon. So you get which van took the breaker and where that van put it down, which is the question that costs you money. A beacon on open ground with no tracked vehicle near it reports nothing at all, and metal and water both weaken the signal. Beacon batteries run 1 to 2 years in daily use and want replacing below 2.0 V.
Draw a geofence around the site once, at the start of the job. Every machine that crosses it leaves an arrival and a departure with a timestamp against it, and the point-visits report turns those into time on site per machine, for any range up to 31 days at a time. Export it to PDF or Excel and send it with the invoice rather than after the phone call. What Yipii gives you is where the machine was and when. Whether those hours were billable is still your argument to make.
It can, and the install is what decides it. A tracker on plant is wired to the machine's 12 or 24 V supply, so you need the hire company's agreement before an auto-electrician goes near it, and we take the unit off again at the end of the hire. On a long hire that is worth doing. On a two-week hire it usually is not, and a beacon on the machine only tells you which of your own tracked vehicles was last near it.
No. Plant buyers reasonably assume the hour meter is in there, so it is better said plainly: Yipii Mobility schedules maintenance by distance or by date, and there is no engine run-time counter behind the schedule. What people do instead is approximate. Work out roughly what a machine puts in per week, convert that into a calendar interval, and set the schedule on dates. It is looser than an hour meter and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Everything else in the maintenance side, work orders, parts, inspections and service history, works the same on an excavator as it does on a van.
Two jobs that come up on nearly every site here have their own sections on the use cases page: Tool & equipment tracking and Theft recovery & unauthorised movement.
The full setup, from the first site geofence to the message that reaches you at 23:14, is written out in the construction and plant guide in the Yipii IoT docs.