Clue Insights manifested as a result of years of experience. As veterans of the construction industry, they saw the inefficiencies plaguing day-to-day operation, how their fellows were being dragged down by the status quo, severely lagging behind the optimization curve. With this understanding came a dream, a mission: connect all construction resources and transform construction into a more productive, efficient, and greener industry. No small feat. Moving towards that lofty goal saw the creation of Clue Insights, a company that, through their construction management platform (aptly named Clue), provides a centralized place to manage a company’s entire fleet operation. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and robust telematics integrations, Clue provides actionable data, a single ‘source of truth’, and a centralized hub to manage all project assets.
Insights Success caught up with Oded Ran, the Co-founder & CEO of Clue Insights, wanting to know how their company is contributing to the efficiency of the construction industry.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Describe your top-notch offerings that address the needs of your customers.
We offer a comprehensive platform to maximize productivity and minimize downtime of our customers’ fleet operation. We do this mainly through our key 3 offerings:
Tracking 100% of your assets: any make, model, or year
- Integrate all off-road & on-road assets in one platform: through 3rd party trackers or OEM telematics
- One easy-to-use mobile and web (dashboard) platform
- Customized reports by company and project types
- All data available via API and CSV
Minute-by-minute productivity tracking with AI-based alerts
- Track utilization, idling, fuel, and location
- Self-reporting machine data and AI-generated insights – by project, asset types, locations
- Abnormal utilization, activity alerts
Fully integrated maintenance process
- Unified view of all diagnostics/engine codes with one-click work order creation
- Customizable digital inspections
- Streamlined preventive maintenance
- Assign and track maintenance progress and attach images on the fly
What makes your company a preferred choice among your clientele over other competitors?
We are the world’s first solution that tracks real-time productivity for 100% of fleets. We provide tailor-made analyses on utilization and maintenance, including customized suggestions and reports for improving operations based on insights from fleet data. Clue is easy-to-use, available for web and mobile, and requires zero training or implementation for customers with a dedicated success manager for life.
From a business leadership perspective, what is your opinion on the impact of the current pandemic on the fleet management sector and the equipment maintenance market?
There’s no arguing that the pandemic has changed the fleet management and equipment maintenance markets in a fundamental way. Companies that were hesitating on remote technologies suddenly found themselves desperate, the care, safety, and health of their people becoming not only paramount but something that needed to be directly monitored. It also tightened belts with profit margins becoming more critical than ever. For us, it made clear that great construction software needed to focus on these areas. Access needed to be easy and available anywhere. Likewise, the communication needed to be streamlined and made a simple click away. Images and videos became more necessary for clarity in day-to-day operations. Total visibility on crews and equipment is now an industry necessity. With profit margins becoming thin and irregular, being aware of asset hoarding and underutilized equipment is essential. This is why real-time productivity tracking is so powerful. With budgets now more ‘shoestring’ than ever, companies need to optimize. They need to know the best fleet compositions for their projects to maximize their resource utilization and reduce their costs. Being able to see the granular movements of your assets – their volumes, cycle times, load counts, driving routes, etcetera, and being able to optimize those operations is crucial to a project’s overall profitability.
Describe the values that drive your organization.
We want to build something useful, reliable, and consistent. Dare we say, a new industry standard. To do that takes time. You have to evolve with your customers. The key: don’t sell…listen! Communicate with them openly and honestly, and make sure you understand their perspective. We ourselves are from more than 10 countries, all with different cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds. Creativity, resourcefulness, and progress are born from our diversity. This internal perspective led to the understanding that open, clear communication is foundational to our success. We also want to contribute to society thoughtfully and with a greener world in mind. We want to reduce the industry’s CO2 emissions by optimizing fuel efficiency in the hope that we’re leaving the environment better for our children.
What is your opinion on the necessity for businesses to align their offerings with newer technological developments, especially when it comes to Digital Transformation?
It’s no secret that the construction industry is one of the least digitized. Companies find themselves in a situation where those who evolve swiftly to newer, more effective technologies will survive while their competitors…don’t. That’s why there are tons of software solutions – the market is ready for change, ready for progress, but few in the industry are inclined to transform easily. It comes down to buy-in and ease of transition. For a real digital transformation, you have to come at it from the field-up; the product has to be useful on the ground level. It has to show value quickly. Otherwise, it’s just another layer of work that drags a company down rather than lifts them up.
In what ways have you or Clue Insights contributed to the community?
We host free webinars on how to increase fleet efficiency and productivity and provide free downloadable maintenance protocols and fault code translations. We’re proud to say that we’ve been recognized by our local and federal customers for saving their costs and avoiding unnecessary expenditures. We’re also proud that, for every customer that signs with us, we plan to donate to a Chicago food charity. Lastly, we reduce the CO2 emission to help move towards a clean and sustainable future.
What are your future aspirations? Where do you see your company in the next five years?
Our vision is to connect and optimize all construction companies, equipment, and employees. We envision increasing productivity in the construction industry by delivering digitized operations, data-based analysis, and AI-enabled telematics. We’re not competing with existing construction solutions, but rather partnering with them to revolutionize the construction ecosystem. If you’ll pardon the pun, we envision becoming the global platform to get all ‘Clues’ for every construction manager to manage and optimize their entire fleet operation.
Exemplifying Excellence
“Having everything all in one place has been a real game-changer for us. We estimate saving $1M using Clue in our first year.”- Darrin Sheriff, Director of Equipment & Purchasing, Palmetto Corp.
“Clue collects and standardizes the telematic data from the OEM systems to allow me to compare everything side by side, saving hours of manual data handling every week.”- Duo Operations UK.