Bouygues Construction Matériel Connects Over 20,000 Pieces of Equipment With LoRaWAN®

Bouygues Construction Matériel, a subsidiary of one of the biggest global construction groups, Bouygues Construction, is implementing an innovative asset tracking solution for smart construction. The solution, offered by Omniscient, is connecting 20,000 pieces of equipment for remote real-time management and optimization, using a LoRaWAN® network from Bouygues Telecom, the expertise of Objenious and intelligent sensors from Abeeway, a subsidiary of Actility, a global provider of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity.

IoT for Equipment Fleet Monitoring

Bouygues Construction Matériel is in charge of managing the group's entire fleet of equipment. The company must ensure that each site is equipped with compliant equipment and in good working order. There are thousands of pieces of equipment to maintain and distribute every day on all construction sites in France.

To solve this problem, Bouygues Construction Matériel is embarking on the deployment of a major IoT project. Omniscient's solution is being deployed on its entire French fleet of bungalows and consoles, on the main components of the tower cranes and on the new B20 formwork. This large scale project involves 100 employees assigned to monitoring the equipment on more than 1,000 sites, spread over five technical bases. The project includes the installation of Abeeway sensors on more than 20,000 pieces of equipment, with LoRaWAN connectivity provided by Bouygues Telecom, producing large amounts of GPS data processed by Omniscient.

In order to adapt to the constraints of volume, geographical perimeter and indoor or outdoor locations, Omniscient has turned to trusted ecosystem companies:

• Actility & Abeeway - providing flexible geolocation sensors, optimized for LoRaWAN networks. Abeeway devices work perfectly outdoors as well as indoors and offer years of battery life, intelligently configured multimodal behavior and advanced location resolution algorithms. Abeeway trackers provide geolocation intelligence for a wide range of use cases, in construction, industry or the supply chain.

“Optimizing the use and monitoring of site equipment is brining significant operational and financial benefits to construction, and with our smart sensors on the LoRaWAN network that last for years, the gain is clearly long-term for Bouygues Construction.” – Oliver Hersent, CEO at Actility.

• Objenious – offering support and LoRaWAN / IoT expertise. Semtech’s LoRa® devices enable the connection of equipment even in isolated and difficult environments. This technology offers many advantages, including several years of energy autonomy, bidirectional communications and deep indoor penetration inside buildings and hard to reach basements.

“Tracking materials became popular thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT) and its benefits are much-publicized. We are happy to offer our technical LoRaWAN expertise to assist Bouygues Construction Material” – Bernardo Cabrera, Director of Objenious by Bouygues Telecom.

With its strong expertise in the construction industry, Omniscient has developed its platform to help the entire construction site ecosystem gain in productivity. The platform allows the digital management of an entire fleet, from electro-portable to multi-ton cranes. With one click, the fleet manager can navigate on a virtual map and view, in real time, the location and tracking sheet of each piece of equipment, including the site configuration of the equipment, as well as links to the quality control sheets.

The information sent by Abeeway's sensors, with embedded LoRa SX126x chipsets, allows Omniscient to calculate performance indicators, dedicated to fleet management, equipment turnover and utilization rates, inventory by technical base, inventory by worksite and number of billable days.

One of the unique major innovations of the solution is that by combining various geolocation technologies it allows the same devices to be used for big and small objects instead of investing in different devices for each use case. Abeeway technology primarily leverages LoRaWAN to establish geolocation services, but can also utilize Wi-Fi in dense urban environment, GPS in the countryside and BLE indoors.

LoRaWAN enables very low power bidirectional communications, deep penetration inside buildings and can operate in isolated and difficult environments. LoRaWAN has also low cost for network infrastructure deployment and maintenance thanks to its high link budget, long range, good redundancy and ease for scaling densification.

Leveraging Geolocation Data to Optimize the Management of High Value Equipment

Bouygues Construction Matériel's commitment to digitalized operations is bringing significant benefits. By adopting this new data-based approach, the equipment division of the construction giant is projecting direct annual savings of 5% to 10% on maintenance and fleet management and a ROI for this technological solution over three years. These results come from savings generated by the following items:

• Easier billing process: all information related to the entry/exit of equipment or the utilization rate is automated on all worksites, which replaces manual processes and makes it possible to bill quicker and more easily.

• Better allocation of resources: the real-time identification of unused equipment on worksites allows operations to mobilize it, avoiding external rentals.

• Precise and reliable monitoring of equipment life cycle: prioritization of equipment reaching end of life cycle, to avoid upgrade costs and to guarantee regular maintenance of equipment for a better life cycle.

• Reduction of inventory costs: a better view of the global inventory allows to minimize inventory per depot.

• Data-driven real-time management: with a simple and long range LoRaWAN connectivity infrastructure, decisions are made quickly, information is at hand and up to date, freeing up time for operational staff to perform value-added tasks.

With LoRaWAN networks, a variety of industries, including construction, are able to deploy a long range, low power network that helps improve daily operations and develop flexible applications.

Explore more LoRa use cases for smart supply chain and logistics.

Semtech, the Semtech logo and LoRa are registered trademarks or service marks of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates.