It can be challenging for businesses that rely on complex machines, such as those in agriculture, mining, telecommunications, utilities, and healthcare, to track repairs and maintenance. Service teams can’t properly maintain equipment if it lacks built-in cellular routers and gateways that deliver reliable internet connectivity. Internal teams often bear the burden of constantly checking remote or legacy equipment or risk disrupting processes. The good news is that modern software for tracking equipment is designed to solve these problems. It makes equipment monitoring more organized and proactive.
Common Service Management Challenges
Unreliable, outdated asset-tracking system: OEMs and equipment-centric companies face a significant challenge because they typically receive a large number of service calls and emails when equipment is not operating. The inconvenient, outdated process forces support teams to receive maintenance requests from clients or partners via communication channels; they can’t foresee unexpected disruptions, and they usually receive notifications after the entire workflow has stopped. This kind of “automation” makes it hard to prioritize requests or follow them up quickly enough to fix the problem without disrupting the workflow.
Clients often don’t know what’s going on with their support requests after they send an email or leave a voicemail because they can’t check the status of their tickets in real time. These situations make people angry and make them call again and again. The good news is that emerging technologies are transforming how you monitor equipment health.
Limited access to machine performance data: Many companies now have machines that can send back useful telemetry. For example, an excavator might record how many hours the engine has been running and how much fuel it has, or a telecom tower might record how strong the signal is. However, if this data remains scattered and difficult to locate, it becomes ineffective. There is “no central place to view or analyze” machine health information in a fragmented setup.
The OEM’s internal team and its dealers still don’t receive notifications that trouble is on the way. If a mining truck’s vibration sensor goes off and no one tells managers, the maintenance staff won’t do anything until the machine breaks down. The primary need here is to automate immediate support processes properly. An adequate asset management solution facilitates reporting machine problems to the OEM and stores them in a unified data source. The lack of automated access to equipment data from a central location also delays or prevents remote diagnostics.
No updates or real-time visibility: When service processes are cut off, not only is machine telemetry missing, but the status of work orders and support tickets is unclear. If a customer sends an email about a problem, they might not know whether a technician has been sent or when a part will arrive. The dealer may have to open a case and keep calling the manufacturer’s support for updates from their end. Things are less clear and less efficient when you can’t see the status in real time.
As mentioned before, dealers “didn’t have real-time access to their support tickets, which led to frequent follow-ups and frustration.” Also, service managers can’t quickly see all the problems that are happening right now or the machines that are broken in the field. This lack of current information poses a problem for all concerned, especially in fields like telecom and healthcare.
Manual workflows: A heavy reliance on manual processes and outdated systems leads service coordinators to spend significant time on administrative tasks, such as updating maintenance logs, emailing status reports, and checking separate systems for warranty or parts availability. These repetitive tasks consume resources and create silos of information. For example, an OEM’s ERP might store machine orders, maintenance schedules, and warranty data that dealers can’t see, so the internal team becomes an intermediary for every query. Such isolated data and a lack of self-service access slow everything down and, again, lead to disruption when the equipment stops working due to inadequate maintenance processes.
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metrics reflect equipment breakdown in the field: on average, only about 60% of planned operating time is truly productive, with the rest lost to slow performance or downtime.
- Working Properly (Fully Operational): ~50–60% of time.
- Not Working Properly (Idle or Suboptimal): ~20–30% of time.
- Not Working At All (Downtime): ~10–20% of time (varies with maintenance quality).
Source: claconnect
An Agricultural OEM’s Digital Transformation in Asset Management (Case Study from Lasoft)
To illustrate how the Lasoft team helps OEM companies to develop equipment management software and solve this challenge by properly handling service requests to automate maintenance processes and deliver competitive services. Consider the case of a Netherlands-based OEM in the agricultural sector (one of LaSoft’s clients under NDA). This company manufactures post-harvest processing equipment, complex machines sold globally to farms and food producers. Before adopting a tracking portal developed by our team, the OEM’s service management was struggling with all the classic issues described above.
LaSoft, as the service provider, partnered with this OEM to create a unified dealer and service portal —an equipment-tracking software platform custom-tailored to the OEM’s operations. This web-based portal became the hub interconnecting the OEM’s support team with all their dealers and customers. We integrated secure VNC connections via existing integrations for real-time diagnostics, remote access, and data collection, enabling the OEM’s team to monitor machine performance. This option allows for proactive maintenance, preventing unexpected downtime and optimizing service operations.
Crucially, the portal also integrated the machines’ telemetry data. Our team connected the platform with the OEM’s existing ERP infrastructure and device gateways to pull in real-time machine logs. Now, support agents and dealers can click a machine in the portal to view its status (online/offline), recent error codes, performance metrics, and maintenance history. This real-time visibility means that if a machine throws an error or shows an anomaly, the service team can often reach out proactively, sometimes before the dealer or client even notices the issue. It also enabled remote diagnostics: from the portal interface, authorized technicians can initiate a remote session to the machine’s control software (when connectivity allows) to troubleshoot without being on-site.
What Equipment Tracking Software May Include?
A modern equipment tracking platform typically includes solid functionality that improves equipment utilization; still, cooperating with a professional team, you can extend features to meet your specific needs:
- Asset dashboards with real-time machine status and telemetry
- Service ticketing system (multi-channel intake, status tracking, technician assignment)
- Predictive maintenance tools using machine data and history
- Role-based portals for dealers, technicians, and admins
- Integration with ERP/SCADA systems for data sync and reporting
- Remote diagnostics support (via VPN, VNC, or Teltonika RMS)
- Alerts and notifications for anomalies, service reminders, or failures
- Self-service portals for customers and partners
IoT Devices: Connecting Remote & Legacy Equipment for Smart Monitoring
Industries that depend on machines have always struggled with poor scheduling preventive maintenance and the inability to monitor their machines, but that doesn’t have to be the case anymore. We’ve shown above how tracking software can help with broken tracking, manual ticketing, and outdated systems.
Our partnership with Teltonika Networks enhances the maintenance process. Teltonika is a company that makes a range of industrial-grade cellular routers and gateways that keep internet connections stable over long distances, even for older machines that don’t have real-time sensor monitoring. These devices can connect to 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks through cellular, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi. They also usually have two SIM slots that can switch automatically, support VPNs, and work with Teltonika’s Remote Management System (RMS).
Safe Remote Management Software
One of the top features of Teltonika’s solutions is the Remote Management System (RMS). This cloud-based IoT platform lets you monitor, configure, and manage your routers and gateways from a single platform. Companies can use RMS to view device dashboards, send firmware updates, and access equipment behind the router without needing public IP addresses or on-site visits.
The Teltonika team cares about security; its routers include built-in firewalls and support numerous VPN protocols, including OpenVPN, IPsec, WireGuard, and more. RMS employs encrypted communications and strict authentication methods, is hosted on AWS, and uses TLS encryption and biometric login via Teltonika ID.
Similar Challenges in Mining, Telecom, Utilities, and Healthcare
The service and maintenance challenges faced by the agricultural OEM above are echoing across other equipment-dependent industries:
Mining: Companies in mining operate heavy machinery (drills, haulers, and conveyors), often in remote or harsh environments. Connectivity can be spotty in deep mines or at far-located sites, making real-time monitoring difficult. Without a modern tracking system, mining maintenance teams might rely on radio calls or periodic manual checks, resulting in delays in addressing equipment issues. Delays and disruptions in maintenance pose a significant problem, as the cost of unplanned downtime in mining is enormous. The industry has much to gain from predictive maintenance and better equipment tracking.
Telecom: Telecom operators must support extensive networks of physical equipment, including cellular towers, switching equipment, and generators. While these objects are geographically dispersed, equipment locations in remote areas make it challenging to maintain uninterrupted operation across all systems. Scheduled routines or outage reports often guide field technicians in servicing cell sites, who want an “all-in-one” solution without separate systems handling support tickets. The challenges here include having a consolidated view of network equipment status and automating incident management.
Utilities: Power and water utilities must maintain equipment such as transformers, substations, pipelines, and meters spread across vast areas. Much of this equipment is older and wasn’t built with connectivity in mind. As a result, utility companies frequently use fragmented maintenance data software, such as SCADA systems, to monitor some equipment, while other tasks are tracked in paperwork or in disparate software. A unified equipment tracking system can bridge these gaps. It can pull data from SCADA/IoT sensors (e.g., transformer temperature or pipeline pressure) and combine it with maintenance ticketing. This gives utility maintenance teams a real-time dashboard: for example, they can see an alert from a smart sensor at a remote pumping station and generate a work order for a field crew directly, all in one interface.
Healthcare: Hospitals and healthcare facilities are filled with advanced equipment: MRI machines, ventilators, infusion pumps, and lab analyzers. Keeping them running is literally a matter of life and death. Traditionally, equipment maintenance in healthcare has been very reactive: a device fails a self-test or breaks down, and then a technician is called. However, IoT and tracking software are transforming medical equipment management. These systems can automatically locate and monitor devices in real time and predict failures using sensor data. A proactive service model ensures that critical machines are fixed before they fail, directly improving patient care.
Final Recap
The conclusion is obvious: It’s always better to be proactive than reactive when it comes to performance monitoring and maintenance, which is why intelligent tracking software reduces costly downtime, improves equipment efficiency, and helps get detailed reports so that you can make informed decisions, get data-driven insights, saving you hours for solving maintenance tasks and keeping equipment working properly to boost productivity for your clients.
When service management is fragmented and machines aren’t connected, businesses suffer from slow response times, higher costs, and equipment loss. Conversely, when you centralize tracking and monitor real-time data, you improve efficiency and optimize utilization of your assets by helping maintenance teams to be more responsive and strategic.
If you want to learn more about our expertise and software solutions, we can arrange a consultation with one of our experts.
