Lower Your Costs for Your Heavy Equipment Needs with These 5 Tips

If you run a business that relies on the use of heavy construction equipment, you know how important but expensive it can be to buy or lease. There is a way to save money regardless of the kind of equipment you use. Whether you rely on excavators lifts or other heavy equipment, these tips can help keep your costs down and improve your bottom line.

1. Keep your idle time to a minimum. When you let anything with a motor sit and idle, you end up wasting a lot of money on fuel. puts undue stress and strain on the engine (just running the engine this way is bad for it), shortens the lifespan of the equipment. There are ways to keep your employees from letting engines idle. There are some technologies that you can use such as an automatic shutdown feature and the one-touch idle control feature. The best way to keep your employees from letting engines sit idling is to make this a policy and train people about its importance.
2. Keep control of your inventory. If you business has a large fleet of lifts, wheel loaders and excavators, it may be possible to not know where everything is all of the time. If you have multiple job sites, you may not always know which piece of heavy equipment is where. While it may be a challenge to keep track of everything, it costs you a lot more to now know. If you are not sure where something is, people may end up renting equipment that you have and could use. Employ a policy to manage and keep track of where you have everything.
3. Buy a maintenance plan. You have many options for the maintenance of all of your equipment. Contracting with a maintenance company that can help keep your fleet up and running. They will handle the preventative maintenance and help with any repairs that need to be made. Make sure you hire a company that has experience working with the kinds of heavy equipment you have in your fleet. They need to know how to maintain everything from you excavators to your sweep trucks and everything else. Buying a maintenance plan can save you money in the long run.
4. Train your employees on the proper use of your equipment. How your staff use your equipment can make a big difference in your bottom line. There are ways to keep your costs down just by having the people who use your equipment use it the right way. Part of this has already been mentioned, by cutting down on the a amount of time your engines are idling will reduce your fuel costs. Using the equipment the way it was meant to be used means they need to be trained and will prevent them from experiencing undue wear and tear. Do not let people push your equipment beyond what jobs and work they can handle and this will save you on maintenance and repair issues as well. It is important that they read the manuals for your excavators, for instance. The better your staff know your equipment, the better they will be able to save you money when they use it.
5. Understand the financial implications of renting, owning and leasing. You have three options when your business needs to use heavy equipment and each has its own financial challenges and implications. You can buy your heavy equipment such as the excavators. You have the option to lease the equipment that you need. Your last option is to rent what you need. When you lease the equipment, you will get new equipment every two or every three years. Renting means you can only have the equipment you need for each job and the cost is generally passed onto the client. There are some tax benefits to owning all of your equipment but that can be a very expensive proposition. This is something you need to really give a lot of thought to before you commit to any one solution for your equipment needs.

One of the challenges of running any construction business is having all of the equipment you need while keeping your costs down is hard but possible.