The Most Valuable Construction Material of All? Data.

In recent years, entire industries have been revolutionized by digital disruption – whether it’s Airbnb in hospitality, Uber and Lyft in ride-sharing, or SPOT in parking.

What do all of these innovative services have in common? They are all built on collecting, analyzing, and employing data to sell unused capacity.

You may well ask: why hasn’t that happened in the construction industry, a business with untold amounts of unused capacity and inefficiencies? If you’ve seen empty dump trucks deadheading, trucks lined up and idling for hours at bottlenecked aggregate facilities, or construction crews sitting around waiting for deliveries, you know what I’m talking about.

The reason why the construction industry hasn’t benefited from digital disruption is that it’s a more complex value chain than hospitality or ride-sharing. It involves contractors, material providers, truck drivers, state and local governments – none of which shares a common set of data. Without that common set of shared data, there’s no single version of the truth that all of these members of the value chain can use to improve their operations.

We created TRUX to solve this problem. It enables drivers, contractors, material providers, and governments to share data that can benefit each other: which contractors are short on trucks, which area drivers are looking for work, what a contractor’s upcoming material needs are, and much more.

This has an immediate and significant impact on productivity, efficiency, and profitability across the dump truck logistics industry. Digitizing construction data also enables easier compliance, auditing, forecasting, and estimating.

As more organizations adopt TRUX, they will gain the opportunity to accrue more benefits. For example, with a ready supply of dump trucks available on demand as their needs wax and wane, contractors will likely see less reason to invest in purchasing and maintaining their own fleets of trucks, thereby freeing up capital for other business-building investments. They also gain the ability to confidently bid on larger projects or projects farther from their home bases.

That future is rapidly approaching. That’s why it’s no exaggeration: data is the most valuable construction material of all. We at TRUX are happy to share it with everyone – to everyone’s benefit.