Using a workshop solution to optimise your asset lifecycle

The cost of unplanned reactive maintenance activity can be significant for rental businesses. Responding to asset faults and breakdowns as and when they occur is costly, time-consuming, and ultimately leads to poor customer service. In this blog, we will look at the different ways that a workshop solution can help your business become proactive while maximizing revenue, minimizing downtime, improving asset utilization, and increasing the safety of your rental equipment.

Preventative maintenance to help you plan for the future

When your equipment goes out to customers, they expect it to be in perfect working order for the duration of rental. You need to have crystal clear visibility of your asset servicing requirements to ensure there are no disruptions to your clients.

With a workshop solution, you will be able to see when your assets are coming up for scheduled maintenance. You can also set certain assets as “unavailable” while servicing is required, helping you to forward-plan more accurately and make sure your rental equipment will be fit for purpose for the full duration of the rental period.

Of course, some of your customers may also have their own equipment that breaks down or needs servicing. With a good workshop solution, you can schedule and service any customer-owned equipment and offer repairs, even if they are not assets that you own. You can set up smart alerts to advise your customers when their equipment maintenance is due, and schedule calls to get your customers’ equipment booked into the workshop.

Integrating telematics to help you inform your workshop decisions

Integrating telematics to help inform your workshop decisions When equipment faults occur with your assets while they are on rental, it can be difficult to determine what the problem is before sending a workshop engineer out onto site. By relying only on customer information and previous service history, your mobile engineers are unlikely to be able to achieve a first-time fix, resulting in extended downtime and multiple, costly site visits. That’s why it’s crucial to use telematics to be proactive instead of reactive.

Improved responsiveness
Increased visibility
Accurate servicing

Predictive maintenance can increase machine uptime by 30%-50% and machine life by 20%-40%.

Proactive instead of reactive

Be armed with the insights and information from your integrated telemetry data to be able to diagnose more issues remotely. Your engineers can be better equipped, when they head out onto site, with the inventory of spare parts they need to fix it first time.

The information could include:

Error codes
Real-time meter readings
Previous usage and active hours
Precise location

With servicing taking place at a time interval or mileage milestone, real-time meter readings can give you an indication of whether your assets truly need servicing. Combining both a scheduled maintenance program and insightful equipment usage data, your service engineers will become more efficient, servicing only the assets that need it.

Manage damage to your equipment

If your rental equipment is damaged, it is important that you can recover costs and ensure your customers are held accountable. With a workshop solution, you can empower your technicians with the ability to capture damage photographs on a mobile device. This can then be stored as evidence to prevent any disputes over when, and how, any damage was caused.

With this process more accurately recorded and with supporting evidence, you can efficiently create work orders and invoices to send to those accountable and increase your revenue by keeping your asset costs to a minimum.

Pre and post rental inspections

You can make sure that you complete accurate and detailed pre and post rental inspections if
you use a Workshop solution. Using digital checklists, nothing gets missed and your team is
encouraged to adhere to your business processes with mandatory checkboxes. Streamlining your rental processes, not only ensures that your equipment is picked accurately and ready for rent, but also gives you better visibility of who is accountable at different stages of the rental journey. You will have a digital trail of who did what and when so that if anything needs to be re-checked or questions need to be asked, you know who to go to.

Having all the parts and equipment when you need them

Workshop managers can get a good overview of equipment status across their entire fleet and inventory to eliminate any upcoming bottlenecks. A workshop solution takes away the need to manually order spares and parts, with the ability to automatically re-order equipment when minimum stock thresholds are reached.

Save time
Improve efficiency
Increase revenue

Save time with quick purchase orders and automatically allocate the parts ordered to your workshop jobs, so that your team can spend more time in the workshop rather than completing laborious admin work.

Going mobile with workshop

Workshop goes further than just your physical workshop. With engineers on the move, it is important to equip them with all the information they need on their handheld devices.

A mobile workshop solution enables your engineers on the road to go completely paperless with electronic proof of servicing or repairs. Your remote team can efficiently plan jobs with asset information on a handheld device and even utilize route optimization to get to your customers as quickly as possible.

Your team in the office or workshop manager can also then see the progress and location of your workshop engineers, which gives you the power to provide accurate predicted arrival times, set customer alerts, and provide fantastic customer service.

Conclusion

There is more to an efficient workshop than just ensuring your equipment is fit for rental. A workshop solution will help you to prolong the life of your assets, recover damage costs from liable third parties, focus on improving internal productivity and workflows, and de-fleet underperforming assets to improve your revenue.

Ready to elevate your rental business?

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