How to Track Tools or Equipment On-board your Truck or Vehicle

One of our new clients asked how he could track tools or equipment that is carried on a Septic Tank Truck…

A while back I sent out a couple of emails and then shot a Video that shows and describes to you how to track Tools or Equipment on-board your Truck or Vehicle but it’s been buried on our main site.

So I decided to bring it out and re-edit the video, polish it up a bit and provide the text of the tip in this post as well

Here’s the Video, it described at least 3 ways you can track Tools On Board:

And here are some written instructions that should help you too.

The simplest way would be to use the notes section for each piece of equipment and just list each tool or on-board equipment associated with the vehicle.

You could then print out all the notes for a piece of equipment by going to Reports-Current Equipment Reports->Notes

You can use that list to go out to the vehicle and verify everything that should be there.

You could also search for the tool to find out which truck it’s on.

To do this you would probably want to use some kind of numbering system to identify each tool, especially if you have a lot of the same model of tool.

Then next to the “Search” button you would change the dropdown where it says “by Equipment Num” to Search “by Notes”

Another less desirable way would be to use the Driver History section of the Equipment summary screen. I would only recommend this if you are not currently using that section for actual driver history.

You can also enter each individual tool into TATEMS as a separate piece of equipment and in the “Location” dropdown you could enter the vehicle that it is currently in.

This would also allow you to keep a maintenance schedule for tools that need maintenance.

You could also search by “Location”. To search by Location you would change the dropdown in the search bar near the top of the screen next to the word “Filter” to “by Location”.

Then next to the word “Choose” there is a dropdown showing all the “Locations” in your database. If you were associating a particular tool with a particular vehicle then that vehicles number would show up as a “Location” to “Choose”

Once you “Choose” a Location in the search bar then click the “Search” button. To display all the Tools or whatever is at/in that “Location”

To display all your Equipment again in the Search results list you would change the “Filter” back to “Show All” then make sure the Search text box to the left of the “Search” button is empty then click the “Search” button again.

And…Wala! All your equipment shows in the list again.

I hope this has not been too confusing…

Have a great week and if you’re on Facebook or Twitter be sure to Like or Tweet this post or use one of the free bookmarking service buttons we provide.

Oh ya, please leave a comment too!

All The Best!

Marc

P.S. In the video I mention using a separate empty database to store and track your tools on-board. I made a copy of an empty TATEMS database and renamed it, so it won’t conflict with your default TATEMS database to: tatems2005be-Tools-On-Board.mdb then I zipped it up. If you would like to have it you can download it by clicking here

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