Conduit · Underground & telecommunications construction
Everything that leaves the yard comes back accounted for.
Forty-one assets. Eleven crews. One start-of-day flow that knows what is hooked to what — and will not let a trailer or a track machine leave the gate uninspected.
What we actually do
We bore, trench and splice.
The hard part is the yard.
Three crews can be productive and the day can still go wrong at 06:40, in the gravel, before anyone has turned a wheel. Conduit builds underground — and builds the operations layer that keeps the iron straight.
Directional boring
Conduit · 2″ to 12″
Road crossings, river crossings and campus laterals without an open cut. Drill rig, mud system, locating gear and a vacuum unit — four assets that each have their own pre-use checks and none of which are the truck.
Trench & conduit
Duct bank · handhole · vault
Mini excavators, plate compactors and trench boxes move between jobsites on our own trailers, sometimes twice in a shift. The asset that started the day on Trailer 14 does not necessarily end it there.
Splice & restoration
Fiber · copper · surface
Splice trailers, gensets and fusion kits — high-value, low-weight, easy to leave behind. Most of what goes missing on a job is not stolen. It is simply never logged out of the last place it was seen.
The iron
Four classes.
Four different inspections.
A power unit, a towed asset and two classes of non‑DOT equipment. They share a yard, a driver and an assignment. They do not share a checklist.
Concept equipment. Model designations and configurations are fictional and are not a representation of any client’s actual fleet.
Where it breaks
The inspection knows about
the truck. Only the truck.
A driver vehicle inspection report is built around a power unit. It has no idea a trailer is coupled behind it, and it has never met the track machine sitting on the deck. So the driver inspects one asset, signs, and tows two uninspected ones out of the gate.
Truck 27
Pre‑trip DVIR fires automatically. 18 line items, photo on any defect, driver signature, defect routes to the shop queue.
Trailer 14
Coupled, loaded and on the road. Lights, brakes, chains, ramps and deck have been checked by whoever felt like it.
Mini excavator 06
Non‑DOT, so no inspection report exists for it at all. Hours, hydraulics, tracks and the last known jobsite are somebody’s memory.
Illustrative concept figures used to frame the problem. Not measured client data.
The unit of work
Stop inspecting vehicles.
Start inspecting assignments.
An assignment is a driver, a date and a set of assets. Once that is the unit, the question stops being “did you inspect your truck” and becomes “is everything you are taking out of this gate inspected.”
- Driver
- Jake M.
- Role tag
- Bore operator
- Crew
- 04
- Date
- Tue 15 Sep
- Origin
- Yard 01
- Destination
- Jobsite Delta
- Power unit
- Truck 27
- Towed
- Trailer 14
- Equipment
- Mini excavator 06
The logic engine
Change what leaves the yard.
Watch the checklist change.
Every rule is conditional on what is actually on the assignment. Nothing is inspected twice; nothing gets skipped because a driver was in a hurry. Add or remove an asset below — the required inspections rebuild in front of you.
In the cab
One queue. No decisions.
Five minutes, not fifteen.
The driver never picks a form. The assignment already knows what is hooked up and what is on the deck, so the handheld opens on a single ordered queue and closes when the last signature lands.
Confirm the assignment
Three assets pre‑populated from the yard board. The driver confirms or flags a mismatch — a flag routes to dispatch before anything else can start.
Truck 27 — pre‑trip DVIR
18 line items. Photo required on any defect. Major defects place the unit out of service immediately and the queue stops.
Trailer 14 — towed asset inspection
9 line items covering coupling, safety chains, lights, brakes, tires, ramps and deck securement. Fires only because a trailer is on the assignment.
Mini excavator 06 — equipment check
12 line items scoped to the track‑machine class: hours, hydraulics, tracks, quick coupler, fluids, beacon. Non‑DOT, so it is a form — not a DVIR.
Sign once. Depart.
One signature closes all three. Gate release posts to the yard board and the assignment moves to active.
3 assets · 3 inspections · 39 items
3 assets
18 items · no defects
9 items · in progress
12 items · queued
Locked until 04 closes
Concept interface. Not a representation of any commercial product’s UI.
Exception path
Trailer 14 fails its brake lights
at 06:58. Now what?
This is the case that decides whether a workflow is real. A defect does not just get logged — it changes what the assignment is, and everything downstream has to recompose around it without a phone call.
Brake lights — left side
Photo required and attached. Classified major by the defect matrix, not by the driver’s judgement.
Trailer 14 held
The asset is locked out of assignment for every crew, not just this one, until a supervisor clears it.
Maintenance request opened
Service request, photo and inspection record land in the supervisor queue with the asset already attached.
Trailer 22 substituted
The assignment changes. Because the assignment changed, a new trailer inspection is generated — the old one does not carry over.
Why this matters
Most inspection tooling treats a defect as a record. Treating it as a state change on the assignment is what prevents the second most common failure in a yard: swapping a trailer at 07:00 and driving off on yesterday’s inspection.
The yard board
Dispatch stops asking
and starts reading.
The same conditional logic that builds the driver’s queue builds the board. Eleven assignments, what each one is taking, what has cleared, and the one line that needs a human this morning.
| Assign | Driver | Assets | Inspections | State | Release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A‑2477 | R. Oyelaran | Truck 12 | 1 / 1 | Cleared | 06:31 |
| A‑2478 | D. Kastner | Truck 08 · Trailer 03 · Plate 02 | 3 / 3 | Cleared | 06:39 |
| A‑2479 | M. Sandoval | Truck 19 · Drill rig 02 · Vac 01 | 3 / 3 | Cleared | 06:44 |
| A‑2480 | P. Nowak | Truck 31 · Locator kit 03 | 2 / 2 | Cleared | 06:50 |
| A‑2481 | Jake M. | Truck 27 · | 3 / 4 | Exception | — |
| A‑2482 | L. Brennan | Truck 04 · Splice trailer 01 | 2 / 2 | Cleared | 06:57 |
| A‑2483 | T. Ibarra | Truck 22 · Trailer 09 · Backhoe 03 | 2 / 3 | In progress | — |
| A‑2484 | S. Whitfield | Truck 15 | 0 / 1 | Not started | — |
| A‑2485 | C. Aguilar | Truck 06 · Trailer 07 · Mini ex 02 | 3 / 3 | Cleared | 07:02 |
| A‑2486 | K. Osei | Truck 29 · Genset 04 | 2 / 2 | Cleared | 07:04 |
| A‑2487 | B. Halvorsen | Truck 11 · Locator kit 01 | 1 / 2 | In progress | — |
Trailer 14 — brake lights, major. Supervisor review.
- Trailers free
- 3 of 9
- Held OOS
- 1
- Equipment on site
- 7
End of day
The driver goes home.
The assets do not all
go to the same place.
This is the part every fleet tool forgets. The truck comes back to the yard; the trailer gets dropped at a laydown; the excavator stays on site because it is going back in the hole tomorrow. If the close‑out flow only asks about the truck, two assets go dark until somebody needs them.
——:——
——:——
——:——
——:——
The driver answers one question per asset at close‑out: where did you leave it. Everything else — time, geofence, odometer, hours — is already known. Four taps, and tomorrow’s dispatch starts from truth instead of a group text.
How it is put together
Six layers. No custom app.
Datum is configuration, not software. Every layer below is something a mainstream fleet telematics platform can already express — the work is in getting the asset model, the tag matrix and the branching right before anyone touches a form builder.
Asset register
Every power unit, trailer and piece of non‑DOT equipment as a first‑class record with a class, a home yard and an inspection profile. This is the layer most builds get wrong, because trailers and equipment arrive as free text.
Inspection templates
DVIR templates for power units and trailers; standard forms for non‑DOT classes. Per‑class line items, photo and signature rules, and a defect matrix that decides major versus minor so drivers do not have to.
Tag & role matrix
Driver tags, crew tags and asset tags decide which steps a person ever sees. A splice tech and a bore operator open the same app and get different days.
Connected workflow
Start‑of‑day and end‑of‑day flows with conditional branching: the trailer step exists only when a trailer is coupled, the equipment step only when equipment is assigned, and the locate step only for crews that carry gear.
Exception routing
Major defect places the asset out of service fleet‑wide, opens a service request with the record attached, notifies the supervisor, and forces the assignment to recompose before gate release.
Reporting & reconciliation
One view per day: what left, what was inspected, what failed, and where every asset finished. Written back as final asset location so the next morning’s board is not a guess.
Platform note
The architecture above is expressed in terms that map onto commercial fleet telematics platforms with custom forms and connected‑workflow features — Samsara, Motive and Verizon Connect among them. Naming these is descriptive only. Datum is an independent concept and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of any of them.
Close
Nothing leaves
the yard alone.
Inspect the assignment, not the vehicle. Everything else — coverage, exceptions, end‑of‑day truth — falls out of that one change.