Is your current asset and plant hire software due for an overhaul? The prospect of what is involved to change solutions can be quite daunting and even off-putting. Where do you start? What do you need? How much is this all going to cost? How long will it take? How will you manage migrating all of your existing data and train users? Is it worth it? What is going to be the impact on the business? All legitimate and reasonable concerns that everyone thinks about.
Your plant hire or construction company is growing year on year. You’re also adding more and more assets to your inventory or branching out into new sectors. If this is the case, then you will certainly want to keep an active eye on whether your current ERP solution is keeping up with that growth. Additionally, you want that with the least amount of resource effort as possible.
Things to think about
- Are you able to get to data and information quick enough?
- Do you have visibility of where your assets are and what status they are currently in?
- Can you see when assets are coming back in off hire so you can forecast availability for future hires?
- Can you control your assets through the various end to end stages in a quick and efficient way?
Full disclosure here, I used to work the hire desk, so this is written from very personal experience! When you’re thinking about your systems please spare a thought for people like me! I had to keep tabs on things in offline spreadsheets. Then attempt to give asset availability to the hire desk each day over the phone or in a spreadsheet. All the while, sending service schedules to the workshop and also cobble together a manual dashboard for a client or 10. Juggling a phone under one ear, trying to keep on top of an ever-expanding inbox and answering in-person questions simultaneously. Or not!
Automating the plant hire process
Your plant hire solution should allow automation of so many of these tasks. This allows you to run your departments as lean as possible and being more productive whilst allowing the technology to take away all those nasty and labour intensive manual, but crucial, tasks. Take a really simple example: maintenance control triggers straight to your workshop team so you never have out of date equipment sat on the shelf because it has missed a service or inspection. That means you have to hire in another asset externally at additional cost.
Your software should allow you to demonstrate to your clients and customers that your assets are safe and compliant. And you won’t have to maintain a bunch of spreadsheets in the background, either. From a business perspective, this means you have better control with a comfortable level of staff numbers so you can still offer cracking rates. Not to mention still being able to up-sell features such as automated notifications, personalized self-service dashboards and interactive reports.
A decision to not make change when it is needed, though, could mean that doing nothing is a greater risk and cost to you. Overall profitability, performance and integrity with your clients are all at risk. Putting off the change may give your competitors an opportunity to swoop in and steal some customers. Plant hire costs are directly affected by the amount of control you can exercise, visibility across all aspects of your business and your ability to maximise productivity. A good plant hire system can help with all of those!
If any of the above is striking a chord with you then get in touch to learn more and grab a demo of our solution and get in front of your competitors today.
