Trackunit shifts focus on Downtime Index

Trackunit said its Downtime Index has served its purpose as an aid to the industry during the pandemic crisis and it will now focus on a new “co-creation phase with cross-industry partners” to define how the Index can be developed in the future.

The data published on 10 June will be the final batch released publicly by the company. Trackunit started sharing its aggregated telematics data 10 weeks ago and KHL Group has been publishing the results as media partner for the past six weeks. Historical Index data will no longer be publicly available, although the graphs and articles that appeared on KHL.com and on Trackunit’s website will be kept on the sites.

Mathias Frost, Director of Software Products at Trackunit, writing on the company’s blog, said; “The Downtime Index was developed rapidly by our data science team as a sprint response to the pandemic and what we perceived to be an urgent need for relevant and time-critical openly available data…it has been a source of hard facts in a situation where all people at every station of construction were in need of clarity.”

He said the data showed how equipment use over the worst of the lockdown period in Europe and North America had provided “transparent evidence of the classic V-shape recovery in the industry. The user feedback it has generated has demonstrated how companies are engaging with the data to help guide their decision-making during this difficult period.”

Frost added that the project had shown how data can be a “positive disruptor” but that the pilot study had run its course; “The story doesn’t end there. We have reached a juncture where we and our collaborators will transfer what we have learned from the initial launch of the Downtime Index into the next stage of development.

“We are therefore initiating a co-creation phase with cross-industry partners to explore the outcomes and define the future proposition of the Downtime Index.”

Frost said Trackunit was committed to providing data in a transparent and collaborative way; “Evidenced by the huge demand and interest in the Downtime Index, this phase of evaluation and development will ensure a future open platform to serve collaborators, customers and the industry and generate positive understanding of the power of data to drive up productivity, efficiency and profitability in construction.”

The full blog post can be accessed here.

The Downtime Index provided powerful information about how the pandemic was impacting construction equipment use, using data from 150,000 machines in Europe and North America.

At the peak of the slowdown at the beginning of April, the Index measure of engine utilisation stood at 55 compared to the baseline figure of 100 in January.