Equipment that arrives the day you need it.
The Equipment Scheduler is the Trueleveler engine that schedules shared equipment — cranes, lifts, hoists, formwork, temp power — across active projects. Links each booking to the sub CPM activity that drives it and flags real schedule risk from the same Schedule Risk data. Flags the lift conflict three weeks out, not the day before mobilization.
Try it now
Equipment Scheduler runs on your equipment list and needs a free account (no card). It has no sample data yet, and the no-signup demo only levels bids.
The big-ticket assets that nobody owns scheduling.
Seven categories cover most of what gets dropped on the floor when sub schedules shift. Each tracked separately because each has different lead times, cost structures, and supplier relationships.
Tower + mobile
Tower assembly + dismantle dates. Mobile crane day-of pours, lifts, and rigging picks. Operator unions on cost. A 350-ton mobile sitting idle for a day is $4–6K out the window.
Material + personnel
Buck hoists, dual-cage personnel hoists. Tied to floor cycle. Demobilization timing matters — finish trades won't start until the hoist is gone.
Scissor, boom, articulating
The most-shared, most-conflicted category. Three subs want the 60' boom on Tuesday. Two will lose.
Concrete shoring & forms
Tunnel, slab, column. Cycle-based. Stripping windows tied to compressive strength tests. Reshore tracking back-of-curtain.
Facade + envelope
Permitted, weather-sensitive, sub-specific. Often shared across MEP and curtain wall crews on the same elevation.
Generators, distribution
Fuel cycles, capacity ramp-up as MEP rough-in starts pulling load. Transition to permanent power is a milestone everyone forgets to coordinate around.
Heaters, dehumidifiers
Cold-weather concrete, drywall mud cure conditions. Fuel logistics. Often arrives late because nobody owns the timing call.
Dumpsters, conex, jobsite trailers
Pickup + swap cycles. Truck routing windows. The least glamorous category. Also the one that creates the most field complaints.
Idle days cost more than people think.
Equipment scheduling lives in someone's head, a whiteboard in the trailer, or a shared spreadsheet that's three revisions behind reality. Then a sub's CPM shifts, nobody updates the equipment, and on Tuesday morning the lift shows up to a slab that isn't ready.
$4–6K / idle day
Day-rate plus operator. If the slab pour pushes a day, the crane was ordered for nothing. Most of the time it gets eaten as a cost-of-business line. We surface the count.
$280–420 / day idle
Smaller dollars per day, but stacked across 8–15 units on a typical mid-rise, idle days run $15–30K/mo when nobody's tracking utilization.
$1K–3K / re-mobe
Equipment arrives, slab isn't ready, sub crew stands around for 2 hours, equipment leaves, comes back next week. Re-mobe fee + lost crew time.
$8K–25K / event
Tower crane sections, 60-day lead. Specialty formwork, 30-day lead. If the CPM shifts forward and nobody re-orders, the supplier can't get it on site — you eat acceleration costs or schedule slip.
Lost productivity, not dollars
Three subs need the boom Tuesday. Two get it after lunch. Half a day of crew time lost waiting. Doesn't show up in your equipment ledger; shows up in your schedule slip report 3 months later.
~3–5% of project cost
Equipment-related cost leakage on a portfolio of mid-rise projects. The number scales with how much shared / rented equipment your firm uses. Bigger firms with portfolio-level equipment management already feel this number; smaller firms feel it as "why do we always seem short on cash this month."
The sub's CPM shifts. You get the flag and a one-click fix.
The hard part isn't the scheduling. It's the re-scheduling. When the sub's schedule moves — and it always moves — nobody wants to find out at mobilization. So the engine watches for it and puts a proposed fix in front of a PM — it never moves a rented crane's dates on its own.
- Sub-CPM linkage — each equipment booking ties to the activity that drives demand (e.g., "crane for deck pour, slab L4 east"), reading the same slack/forecast fields Schedule Risk computes. When that activity's committed finish date slips past the booking's own end date, the reservation is flagged and a proposed new date range is queued — a PM accepts or dismisses it with one click. Nothing shifts silently.
- Supplier notify — when the engine flags real schedule risk on a booking, one click sends the supplier an email with the new date, the activity it ties to, and your contact for verification. Logs the send to the reservation automatically.
- Conflict detection — two subs want the same shared lift on overlapping days. Surfaces the conflict at booking time, not at mobilization.
- Multi-job portfolio view — for firms running 3–15 active projects, see all equipment commitments at the portfolio level. Move a tower crane to a sister job after demobe without anyone calling around.
- Idle-time tracking — bookings vs actual utilization. Surfaces "we paid for 14 crane days, used 11" as a monthly report.
It works alone. It's better in a chain.
Equipment scheduling is most useful when it's reading from the schedule and writing to procurement — not living in a separate tool nobody updates.
- Schedule Risk — the same slack-days, critical-path, and forecast-finish fields Schedule Risk computes are read directly to flag an at-risk booking and propose a shift — a PM confirms before anything moves.
- Procurement — supplier contact lives on the booking today; a direct PO link is on the roadmap, not built yet.
- Daily Log Synthesizer — log a day's field activity separately today; automatic cross-referencing with equipment bookings isn't built yet.
Questions we keep getting.
Do you integrate with rental suppliers' systems?
Working on it. Phase 1 (today): email-based supplier coordination — auto-generated emails with structured booking details, supplier confirms by reply or by clicking a confirmation link. Phase 2 (on the roadmap): direct API integration with United Rentals, Sunbelt, and 3–5 regional suppliers per major metro. The email path keeps the engine useful from day one for the long tail of small suppliers who don't have an API.
What about owned equipment (firm-owned fleet)?
Same scheduling, different cost model — instead of rental day rates, we use the firm's loaded internal allocation rate. Most firms have one even if it's loose ("$650/day for our 80' boom"). Helps the portfolio view show which jobs are subsidizing equipment utilization and which are bearing it.
How does it handle operator scheduling?
For union operators on cranes specifically: tied to the equipment booking. When the crane moves a day, the operator request moves with it. We don't replace the union dispatch — we just give the dispatcher accurate notice when something changes, with the activity context attached.
Is the Equipment Scheduler live?
Yes — it ships with the platform today and reads directly from the same slack-days/critical-path/forecast fields Schedule Risk computes, which is what makes the schedule-linked flagging and shift proposals work. It's built for firms running multiple active projects with significant shared-equipment exposure (tower cranes, hoist systems, large lift fleets). The 14-day free trial includes it with no credit card.
Stop chasing the crane schedule. Let the equipment shift with the job.
If you've ever paid for a day of mobile crane time the slab wasn't ready for — you're the firm we built this for. It's live today, on every plan.
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