Businesses · Construction
For project teams running excavators, tippers, cranes, transit mixers, gensets and site vehicles — owned and rented — across sites that never look the same twice.
The drain
An asset on a site is a fixed cost pretending to be a variable one. It bills the same whether it moved earth or sat behind the batching plant — and the difference between those two states is the entire margin.
The bowser leaves with a number written on a slip, and arrives back empty. Between those two facts is thirty-four rupees of every hundred, and no independent record of where it went.
A rented excavator at 40% utilisation is not cheaper than one at 80%. It is exactly twice as expensive per hour of work done — on an identical contract, at an identical rate.
Over-revving, load slamming, tracks turned on rock. The operator writes the maintenance bill months before the workshop reads it out.
Payroll is the one line on this list that is exact, undisputed and fully visible. It is also the line that moves diesel, wear and output more than any other.
An asset that finished its scope three weeks ago and is still on the invoice. A machine mobilised early and standing by. Standby is a contractual entitlement, and the least examined line on any bill.
Diesel, wear, standby and the utilisation that governs the hire charge are ₹55 of every ₹100 — and none of them can be read from a site report. They are readable only at the machine.
One shift
A single day on a project site. Five moments where the hour is decided — and the only one anybody currently records is the last.
Location tells you an asset is present. Presence has never been the expensive question.
The meter starts. The work does not.
A rented excavator mobilised nine days before the excavation front was ready. The hire clock ran from day one, because the contract says it does, and nobody was counting.
Nothing was stolen and nobody was at fault. The machine was simply early — and the only person who would have noticed was not measuring.
On site is not the same as at work.
Three excavators are deployed to the project. Two are in the excavation zone. One has been parked behind the batching plant for eleven days, appearing on every report as deployed.
All four appear on the deployment report as active. One of them is a monthly hire charge attached to a parked machine.
The engine ran nine hours. It worked four.
An engine at idle is an engine hour. It bills, it burns diesel, it wears — and it moves nothing. Engine load is what separates the two, and an hour meter cannot see it.
Four hours under load. Three and a half at idle. One and a half tramming between fronts. The hour meter counted nine, and billed for nine.
Your diesel. Their tank. No witness.
Four hundred litres left the yard. The slip records where it was meant to go. Whether it arrived there, and whether the machine burned it or someone else did, is a question the slip cannot answer.
Forty-eight litres, on one round, worth ₹4,560. The gap has never had a number on it before, because nothing between the slip and the tank was measuring.
The vendor read the meter. You paid the bill.
Every month, a commercial team certifies hire charges against a reading taken by the party being paid for them — because there has never been an independent one to check it against.
Three numbers for the same month. 186 is on the invoice. 131 is what the machine recorded. 66 is what you actually bought.
How Taabi is different
Every telematics box can report an hour meter. That is a number, and a number taken by the counterparty is a negotiation.
Taabi holds the claimed hour against hour meter, engine load, geofence, fuel draw and pattern before it is allowed to become a certified invoice line.
A reading taken once at month-end can only be accepted or contested. A reading taken every minute is a record — and a record cannot be revised at the point of invoice.
Rules out retrospective readingLoad, RPM and hydraulic demand separate work from warm idle. An engine at 800 RPM with no load is burning diesel and accruing an hour — and producing nothing that belongs on a bill.
Rules out idle billed as workShared plant moves between sites and packages. Hours that accrued on someone else's stretch have a way of arriving on the invoice of whoever is easiest to bill.
Rules out cross-package billingAn excavator under load burns at a knowable rate. If 186 hours of work were done, the fuel would show it. Fuel is the physical cross-check that no hour meter can be argued past.
Rules out phantom hoursOne month is a discrepancy. Six is a commercial position. The pattern is what moves the conversation from a disputed invoice to a renegotiated rate.
Establishes patternThe five signals are not a feature list. They are the reason the certification holds when the vendor disputes it — and the reason it can be settled before the bill is paid rather than after.
This is the whole difference. An hour meter gives you a claim. Hour meter plus load plus geofence plus fuel plus pattern gives you a record — and only a record survives a commercial review.
Use cases
Deployment is not utilisation. Separate the machines that worked from the machines that were merely present.
Diesel arrives by bowser and leaves without a paper trail. Reconcile issued against burned, machine by machine.
Downtime on a site is measured in schedule, not in repair cost. The penalty clause does not care what the part cost.
Tippers on public roads and operators inside the boundary carry different risks, and need one line of accountability.
Compare sites on the same four numbers: utilisation, diesel per hour, downtime and cost against project.
Solutions available
Engine hours, deployment, idle time and utilisation across excavators, cranes, gensets and mixers — the record that settles an hour-meter dispute.
Diesel drawn against diesel burned. Bowser reconciliation, abnormal drops and idle burn at machine level.
Site geofences, asset movement between projects, and vehicle activity across distributed locations.
OBD, health alerts and maintenance risk, so machines are serviced between cycles rather than during them.
ADAS and operator monitoring for tippers, mixers and site vehicles moving on public roads.
Utilisation, diesel per hour, downtime and cost benchmarked across sites, projects, vendors and asset classes.
Business impact
Not a percentage we cannot source. A list of things that are true on the left today, and true on the right after.
Every row on the right resolves to the same denominator — ₹ / engine hour
Proof slot — empty
One named construction customer, with fleet or asset count and a measured delta. This is the block an enterprise buyer scans for evidence, and it is the one thing this page does not yet have. Fill it with a customer — not a borrowed benchmark.
Who it's for
Project heads
Leaders carrying equipment cost against a schedule, with no independent measure of whether the equipment worked.
Plant and machinery
P&M teams managing owned and rented fleets across sites, billed on readings taken by the party being paid.
Commercial and QS
Teams certifying hire bills and diesel consumption they had no way to verify at the moment it was drawn.
FAQ
It is measurement at the asset rather than at the site. Engine hours, diesel drawn, idle time, health and operator behaviour are recorded per machine, on every project, for owned and rented equipment alike. The purpose is to answer a question a site report cannot: not where the asset is, but whether it worked, for how long, and on whose fuel.
The same way it handles owned equipment. Rented plant is usually where the cost leaks, precisely because the operator has the invoice but not the instrumentation. An independent record of engine hours and diesel turns hire-bill certification from a trust exercise into a reconciliation — and idle rental, the most common and least visible leak on a site, becomes something a commercial team can see and challenge.
Yes. Older and non-OBD assets are instrumented through hour-meter, fuel-level and movement sensing rather than diagnostic ports, which covers utilisation, diesel and idle time — the three components that make up most of the cost per engine hour. Deeper fault-code diagnostics do require a compatible ECU, and we would rather be clear about that in a scoping call than discover it during deployment.
Get started
See the drain, the shift and the evidence chain run against a live project fleet — owned and rented on one view.
