Equipment prices are rising from year to year, so not every construction business can afford or is ready to buy it. In this situation, the decision to rent equipment is made. Rising costs of machinery are making more and more construction companies to use equipment sharing services. Let’s observe what concrete benefits they gain.
Equipment sharing, first of all, is an effective tool for equipment base modernization and costs savings. An option of renting equipment (dozers, backhoes, excavators, and trenchers) instead of buying it, offers great flexibility. Clients of sharing services don’t have to spend a great portion of their budget on buying specific pieces of equipment. Moreover, sharing companies take care of transporting the necessary equipment at your place.
Satisfaction of a one-time need for exclusive equipment
Some clients demand a really specific piece of equipment for just one project task. This machinery may be extremely high-priced and may not be worthy of buying for a one-time project. In such cases, an equipment sharing service can be the answer to the problem.
Saving costs on storage and maintenance
Taking care of equipment is something really time and effort consuming, and quite costly. The best solution is to instruct storage and maintenance to asset owners to take care of their machinery’s functionality.
The demand creates all kinds of rental offers, and new players, mostly not big, appear. They join sharing platforms, as a rule. Sharing platforms are the intermediaries that provide marketplace and related services for all participants (ones who own assets and those who want to rent them), but carrying fewer risks. Platforms aim at simplification of leasing and renting procedures. Due to the low entry threshold into sharing business as a platform, the number of them is growing very fast, taking various forms, including b2b clubs, concentrating on satisfying the demand of VIP members, specific equipment requests, etc. Sharing platforms commonly use fix-price membership, percentage of the deal, monthly and yearly access payments, and other revenue models that directly depend on the number of participants in these marketplaces. That’s why they execute the active promotion, targeting at maximum coverage of all sharing process participants. Such platforms create competition in the market.
Equipment rental businesses have much in common in this way with sharing services from the point of view of customer acquisition and service providing. But despite the growing number of platforms, they have rather limited functionality for rental business owners. More and more often, rental businesses decide to develop their own solutions, tailored under the existing clients with the scope for expansion, universalization, providing new services and markets. Apart from these, they have many other aspects to optimize and digitize to maximize their revenue. So, mid-sized and large rental companies are forced to gain competitive advantages in order to survive, and therefore they need to implement automated systems, modern software, and trendy technologies.
What are specific challenges that the business face and problems it can cope with by implementing software solutions, IoT and real-time tracking technologies:
- internal processes establishing
- customer service improvement
- opportunity to analyze the effectiveness of the business
- control over assets
- risks reduction
- and much more.
With this, let’s get acquainted with the opportunities that modern technologies, such as IoT and tracking, provide, as well as advanced software solutions:
- The client’s service. With this software module, clients book the equipment they need, get invoices, attach supporting documents, pay for rents and leasing, get notifications. It provides the catalog with detailed equipment descriptions, the status of presence, booking opportunities. The main idea is giving the client an opportunity for self-service, reduce the load on customer support managers, and make the full process quick, easy, and transparent for both sides.
- Equipment rental planning. This module is designed to provide managers an opportunity to observe the utilization of construction equipment in real-time and plan it for the future, from the point of demand. The equipment rental business can predict long-term demand, analyze the most needed positions, purchase additional equipment, and sell out those pieces that become less relevant. Anticipating the release of a certain quantity and nomenclature of equipment, the business can plan client acquisition campaigns, and be very flexible in managing their assets.
- Utilization real-time tracking. This is a set of dashboards that gather information from the IoT devices on the equipment and construction vehicles. Through this solution, managers gain control of utilization compliance with operating conditions, such as weight loads, technical operating mode, and many others. In case of violation, the responsible manager receives a notification, and, depending on the severity, makes decisions on further actions. Utilization time tracking feature is actual for short-term rentals, showing expiration dates, and suggesting customers to prolong their rent by sending notifications.
- Position tracking. The essential part of the equipment rental business is to ensure that assets are not transferred to third parties without the owner’s permission. GPS position tracking feature shows every equipment current position in different slices – by type, client, and equipment ID number. This feature also prevents from thefts, helping react operatively in cases of deviations from the usual routes.
- Assets maintenance. The module is dedicated to quality control of the state of expensive equipment, the anticipation of breakdowns and maintenance planning. It shows the current state of the assets, reminds of scheduled inspection, and also saves their results, reports of breakdowns, replacement of parts, helps to plan the procurement of components, and much more.
By combining the latest technologies with management software, mid-sized equipment rental business is able to save time on routines, manage risks, extend service life, provide the best service to clients, optimize internal processes. Taking the advantages of sharing platforms models, but going its own way, the business has a proven opportunity to grow its brand, find new markets, and continue its evolution in the context of digitalization.
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