How Power Corporation of America saved up to $20,000 per month in avoidable equipment purchases

Three subsidiaries now share one view of 650+ trucks and thousands of trailers.

7 minute read

 

Power Corporation of America builds and maintains the infrastructure that moves electricity: transmission lines, drilled pier foundations, distribution systems, substations and related electrical installations for the power utility industry. The work runs through three subsidiaries, Precision Foundations, CNC Power Line and Southeast Power, and PCA itself operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Grid Tek.

That work takes equipment, and a lot of it. They need nearly 1200 GPS units installed across three accounts with fleet sizes that include 1200 trucks alongside roughly 1000-1200 trailers, generators, and pieces of heavy machinery. Crews and their equipment move between job sites and between divisions constantly. At that scale, a simple question about where one trailer sits turns into a hard question to answer.

Zackry Corter joined Southeast Power in 2019 and moved to the PCA parent company as Fleet Program Coordinator in 2021. He inherited a fleet where the powered units reported in and everything else went dark.

The assets nobody accounted for.

Corter took over a fleet with six specific gaps. Every one of them traced back to the same issue where their trucks reported their location and nothing else did.

• Trailers and other non-powered equipment carried no tracking hardware, so the assets that sat idle longest were the assets nobody was able to find.
• Divisions had no view into each other’s equipment location or utilization, so one division bought a machine, sometimes a multi-million-dollar machine, while another division had the same machine sitting unused.
• The three subsidiaries billed identical equipment at different rates depending on which entity a unit happened to be assigned to.
• Isolating the specific data each audience needed, mileage, fuel and speed, meant the tax team pulled and combined several raw reports by hand every month.
• Fleet leadership had no way to prove which miles ran on public roads and which ran off-road, which left off-road fuel tax advantage claims without backup data in an audit.
• New equipment and new drivers entered the system inconsistently, often without asset identifiers, vehicle identification numbers (VINs) or driver identifiers, which resulted in a disconnect between completed inspections and billing tied back to a specific truck.

Every one of those gaps cost PCA money in a way that was hard to see and harder to prove.

 

“We’d get the question, where’s this trailer at? I had no idea; I couldn’t tell you. But now with Zonar we're able to say that it's sitting right there, the last location of it, and that it can be recovered.” Zackry Corter, Fleet Program Coordinator, Power Corporation of America

 

One process for every new asset.

Corter built a defined process for every new piece of equipment and made it automatic. Installing a Zonar unit triggers an email, a text message and a maintenance work order at the same time, which puts the asset in three separate systems on the day it arrives, with its asset identifier, VIN and driver assignment attached. Assets stopped falling through the cracks at intake.

The existing fleet took a reconciliation. Corter worked directly with his Zonar account team to match billed GPS hardware against physical equipment. Units nobody accounted for came off the books and went back on as trackers matched to real equipment needs, which put tracking on the trailers and the yellow iron that had none.

Hardware matched to each asset.

PCA runs different hardware on different classes of asset, and all of it reports into Zonar’s fleet management platform. The platform holds every vehicle, asset, report and alert in one place.

• Zonar V4™ handles the heavy powered units that require inspections. V4 installs on the engine control module (ECM) and streams true location along with essential diagnostics and every start, stop, turn, brake and idle event.
• Zonar LD™ covers the light-duty trucks that need mileage and location. LD plugs into the on-board diagnostics (OBDII) port, installs in minutes with no wiring harness, and comes off just as fast when a vehicle leaves the fleet.
• Zonar ZTrak® closed the gap that started the whole project. ZTrak is a small unbranded ruggedized tracker that mounts to a trailer, a generator or a piece of yellow iron with screws, bolts, cable ties or adhesive. ZTrak reports location on a daily ping schedule or on movement, and the battery lasts up to 10 years with field-replaceable cells.
• Zonar EVIR® gives crews zone-by-zone inspections with a date and time stamp on every zone, which ties each completed inspection to a specific vehicle and a specific inspector.

Pricing came last. Corter standardized the rate for identical equipment across Precision Foundations, CNC Power Line and Southeast Power, so the same hardware costs the same at every subsidiary.

Visibility that changed the budget.

PCA has reliable visibility now into where every asset sits, who uses it and whether the usage justifies keeping it. That changed how divisions request new equipment and how those requests get approved.

A division asking for a machine gets checked against what the other two divisions have parked. The check turns purchases into transfers, and PCA frequently avoids roughly $5,000–$20,000 a month in equipment buys by moving underused assets to where the work is, depending on job scope, bid volume and equipment needs. Vehicle transfers between sites don’t happen every month, but when they do, the payoff is substantial.

Utilization improved by at least 5–10%. Visibility alone drove the first part of that gain. Redeploying equipment to where it was actually needed drove the larger part, and live data has since become a major factor in justifying installations on more equipment.

Billing disputes between divisions over equipment transfers dropped, because Corter confirms exactly where and when a machine moved.

And the recoveries added up. PCA recovered seven stolen assets in 2025 using last-known GPS location: one pickup truck, two trailers, two crew trucks, a 55-ft bucket truck and a digger derrick. A brand-new Ram 5500 came back within days of the theft.

Reporting cut from four to one.

Monthly reporting used to take four separate raw reports pulled by hand and reconciled against each other. One automated report replaced all four.

• Four manual monthly reports collapsed into one automated report supporting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 2290 filings.
• Reporting staff got 15–20 hours a week back, roughly 2–4 hours a day previously spent compiling utilization, mileage and location numbers.
• GPS coordinates separate on-road miles from off-road miles, which supports fuel tax advantage claims and backs up the filings in an audit.

 

“Thanks to Zonar, we had seven recoveries of stolen assets in 2025: one pickup truck, two trailers, two crew trucks (5500s with flatbeds), a 55-ft bucket truck, and a digger derrick (General 65). Our utilization improved by at least 5–10%, driven initially by visibility alone. The larger gain came from redeploying equipment to where it was actually needed, which lifted our reported utilization. Live data has also been a major factor in justifying installations on more equipment””
Zackry Corter, Fleet Program Coordinator, Power Corporation of America

 

A template for the wider portfolio.

What PCA built is the template now for everything around it. The intake process, the hardware standards and the standardized pricing carry over to the sibling Grid Tek utility companies, starting with American Power, Valiant Energy Services and Yates Lime Company.

Every trailer, every generator and every piece of yellow iron on the yard reports in now, and the fleet Corter inherited runs on one record.

 

“We’ve built what I would consider a pretty well-oiled machine using Zonar and our other systems to help us optimize our fleet, not just for our specific company, but going forward with our other Grid Tek utility companies.”
Zackry Corter, Fleet Program Coordinator, Power Corporation of America

 

 Contact us | Get pricing

FAQ

Question:

How does a fleet track trailers and heavy equipment with no power source?

Answer:

ZTrak mounts to non-powered assets with screws, bolts, cable ties or adhesive, and it reports location on a set ping schedule of one, two or four pings a day, or on movement. Battery life runs up to 10 years and the batteries are field-replaceable. ZTrak reports location only, which is the data that matters for a trailer or a generator sitting on a yard. When an asset goes missing, Zonar activates Theft Recovery Mode on request.

Question:

Does every vehicle in a mixed fleet need the same hardware?

Answer:

No. PCA runs V4 on the heavy powered units that need diagnostics and inspections, LD on light-duty trucks that need mileage and location, and ZTrak on trailers and non-powered equipment. All three report into the Zonar fleet management platform, so the fleet reads as one fleet regardless of which device sits on each asset.

How does telematics data change equipment decisions across divisions?

Answer:

Utilization data in the Zonar fleet management platform shows which division has a machine sitting idle and which one needs it. PCA answers a new equipment request by checking that first, then transfers the asset instead of buying a second one. The same record settles billing disputes between divisions, because it shows exactly where a machine was and when it moved.

Question:

What does it take to bring an untracked fleet into one system?

Answer:

Two things. An audit that matches every billed telematics unit against a physical asset, so hardware with no matching equipment gets rehomed to equipment that needs it. And a defined intake process for everything that arrives afterward, so each new asset enters the system with its identifier, VIN and driver assignment attached on day one. PCA automated the intake step, triggering an email, a text message and a maintenance work order at install.