Equipment & Rental GPS Tracking

At Lightbug, we serve other businesses looking to extract value from location data. Our systems are designed to allow positioning of pretty much anything with maximum convenience.

Rental Equipment and construction companies alike turn to us when they need a one size fits all solution for tracking that just works. Our customers appreciate the level of support we offer, the flexible contract terms and the ease of deployment.

Why use GPS Tracking

Tracking fleets of equipment has many benefits, often unique to each company, however we tend to see the following common problems that companies are looking to tackle

1. No foolproof way of knowing where everything is: systems for booking in/out equipment are only as good as the data being entered. Whilst our customers wouldn’t be where they are without having figured out how to do this well, there’s always something that slips through and managing those exceptions takes a huge amount of time. Simply put, “Who has What?” has no straightforward answer.

2. Not knowing where to pick something up at the end of the job. On large sites it can take a long time to figure out where the equipment has been left. Having to make several phone calls per pickup leads to slow or delayed pickups whilst using more company resources.

3. No cohesive way of monitoring utilization: servicing of equipment is done too often at best, and not regularly enough at worst due to imprecise utilization metrics. Not being able to tell the difference between a job that hammers the equipment and one where it is barely used means companies can’t make informed servicing decisions.

What Lightbug can offer

We have a range of trackers to tag essentially any asset and an easy-to-use software interface for monitoring and managing them. Everything we offer is fully integrated and we aim to be a “one-stop-shop” for all your equipment monitoring needs.

There is a hardware fee plus a recurring “data” fee (can be prepaid), with discounts available based on volume. With 10 or 10,000 devices, you and your team will be able to login from your phones and PCs to get an instant overview of your fleet. There are no “per user” fees.

Assets can be tagged to help with management and searching (for example EquipmentType = CircularSaw), and servicing intervals can be entered easily based on distance travelled or other metrics. Reports are intuitive and can be emailed to you on a regular basis, so you never need to log on to our system until something goes wrong.

Read only users can be given access to a select number of devices, for example the pickup team could see just the items they need to collect today.

What makes us different

• Convenient solution for lower value tools. Often GPS/Cellular GPS tracking for hand tools doesn’t make sense from a cost or size perspective. We offer small & cheap bluetooth tags to go on lower value equipment: rather than being independently trackable, these devices will piggyback connectivity from trackers on more expensive assets. This hybrid solution maintains most of the benefits of tracking at a fraction of the cost.

• Pain-free support: we do everything except installation whilst that might not sound like a benefit, it means you can come to us and say “it’s not working” and we’ll be able to resolve your issue rapidly. No pointing fingers at the hardware vendor or saying your software needs an update, we’ll just help you get it sorted. Fitting is easy enough to be done in house as part of regular maintenance work.

• 3 year warranty on all devices as standard. Everything we make is built in house in our Bristol (UK) factory. This has benefits for support as mentioned above, but it means we can have absolute confidence in the services we sell. 

• Customisation opportunities. If you choose Lightbug to help with your equipment management needs, we will go out of our way to ensure that the system we’re selling helps you. It could be something as simple as changing the format of a report to match your company template or 3D printing 20 mounts to fit a specific piece of equipment.

• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) since we’re offering an end-to-end solution, you’re only paying for one supplier’s overheads. Our low monthly fees very quickly make us the cheapest option after just 1 or 2 years of usage.