Zonar

Hannah Storrs, Sr. Manager of Content

Here's a scenario that plays out in energy and utility operations more often than most managers want to admit: you quote a project, allocate 20 vehicles across multiple sites on an eight-week window. In practice, 15 are deployed. The other five are parked, too far from the action to redeploy quickly and invisible to anyone tracking available capacity.

Those idle assets represent real cost. They could be generating revenue on another project or reducing fleet overhead. The decision to redeploy never gets made because the data to make it isn't there.

Mixed fleets spread across multiple job sites, with limited visibility into which assets are working and which are sitting idle. The gap between what's available and what's deployed is often invisible until it shows up in project margins.

GPS tells you where. Telematics tells you what.

A bucket truck sitting at a job site for four hours looks identical to a vehicle that's been abandoned unless you know whether the boom was running. Standard GPS tells you where the truck is. Detailed telematics data tells you how it's operating.

That distinction matters.

When a boom truck elevates its bucket, the vehicle needs to be powered and idling to drive that equipment. Power take-off (PTO) data flowing through a telematics unit lets fleet managers distinguish between productive on-site operation and true idle time. PTO data turns guesswork into accurate billing and real utilization numbers, so fleet managers know which vehicles are working and which can be redeployed.

For fleets with a mix of light-duty take-home trucks and heavy specialized equipment, a single telematics solution covering the full range means everything reports to one platform. Fleet managers spend less time switching between systems and more time acting on what the data shows.

Non-powered assets go missing. Tracking prevents it.
Powered vehicles are part of the picture. Energy and utility fleets also manage generators, power wheels, cable reels, trailers and specialty tools. These assets live on job sites for weeks at a time and frequently change hands between crews and projects.

Equipment left at a remote site can disappear or be stolen without anyone knowing until a crew arrives and finds it gone. Asset trackers report location and movement up to four times per day and trigger alerts when an asset moves outside a defined area or outside scheduled hours.

When contractors share equipment across projects, or when severe weather sends crews and assets across state lines through mutual assistance networks, knowing exactly where every piece of equipment is and confirming it returns matters as much as the billing.

Acquisitions multiply the complexity.

Energy and utility companies grow quickly, often through acquisition. According to Morrison Foerster, utility and energy mergers and acquisitions surged 80% in value to $137 billion in 2024 alone. Every new company added to the portfolio brings its own vehicles, its own equipment and its own maintenance history.

A fleet that was manageable at 200 vehicles across two locations looks very different at 800 vehicles across twelve, with bucket trucks from three different manufacturers, light-duty trucks of varying ages and non-powered equipment that may or may not have been tracked consistently. Growth increases complexity and reduces visibility.

Without a unified view, fleet managers piece together information from multiple systems, make decisions on partial data and discover gaps only when something goes wrong.

One screen, every asset.

Uptime, safety and asset visibility are often treated as separate problems requiring separate tools. In practice, they share a common root cause of fragmented data. When inspection records, vehicle diagnostics and asset tracking all live in different systems, decisions get made on incomplete information.

A unified fleet management platform changes that. Everything feeds into one view, powered and non-powered, light-duty and heavy specialized, in the yard and in the field.

The Zonar white paper No room for downtime: How energy and utility fleets manage uptime, safety and asset visibility covers the full operational picture of predictive maintenance, OSHA-compliant inspections, dashcam protection, asset tracking and unified fleet management across complex mixed fleets.

Download the white paper: https://www.zonar.com/whitepapers/how-energy-and-utility-fleets-manage-uptime

Talk to a Zonar specialist: zonar.com/contact