How to Increase the Uptime of Your Rental Equipment
Table of contents
Equipment rental is not only a competitive sector; it also comes with a considerable level of expectations. One of the main expectations from an equipment rental company is the ability to supply equipment on demand and that too in working condition or increase the uptime. Furthermore, the equipment rental company is expected to guarantee a response time, repair a piece of equipment on the same day when required, and keep scheduling preventive maintenance to ensure that there is no equipment downtime. The demand seems simple enough when you consider that the core of an equipment rental business is to rent out assets that are in peak condition.
However, in reality, it is anything but. Maintenance is tricky and can be expensive and time-consuming. One would not want to open up equipment to check and service it when it is in good condition. Though today there is technology that will signal the main office when an asset that has been rented out has a problem, there may be no context to this information. For instance, the central office may not know what is wrong with the equipment. As a result, the people wanting to undertake the repair may have to go in without the requisite information to complete the repair quickly. What this translates to is a lot of the repair time is dedicated to exploration, educated guesswork, and communication.
But all hope is not lost; you can address all these issues and more with an optimum rental solution. Here is how an equipment rental solution can help increase the uptime of your rental equipment:
By providing asset structures: This can be the starting point to work towards improving the uptime of your equipment. As you are aware, most assets that you are renting out are composed of numerous parts. And it is a failure in one of these components which can result in downtime of the equipment. When you have the asset structure, the location and through experience, and historical data in the system, you even an idea about the proclivity of the machine for failure in particular situations. Information like this can be invaluable in a position where you have to undertake speedy repairs to restore the equipment to working condition.
Setting up maintenance schedules: Your equipment rental solution can help you collect and store the maintenance cycles of your assets from the supplier. You can set up meters that will trigger off the time for maintenance of the equipment automatically based on the threshold or interval as applicable. While this is an excellent way to ensure that maintenance schedules are met with, sometimes there could be a failure to do so. Your equipment rental solution can help you schedule delayed maintenance by combining work orders to new counterparts to ensure it is completed.
Equipment lifecycle management: Lifecycle management literally means that; starting from the procurement stage, when you can record the types of maintenance required to the end. It begins with inbound management, inventory management, deployment, right up to reassignment. As your equipment rental solution helps you track the equipment through all the stages, it is easy enough to schedule maintenance and ensure that it is carried out.
What is more equipment rental solutions also come with IoT and Business Intelligence, which means you have access to information about the location, usage, and the intelligence about similar equipment. Your equipment rental solution can help you increase the uptime of your equipment with all these features and more.