The construction industry grappled with serious issues during Covid-19 but responded well to a surge in demand recently. The construction rental equipment market has been vital in supporting rapid growth in the industry.
ResearchandMarkets reports that the heavy rental equipment market is projected to reach $117,788.8 million by 2030 with a CAGR of 4.3% from 2021 to 2030. This growth may translate into an increase in customer demand, greater adoption of advanced, up-to-date rental equipment, and increased profits for rental businesses.
However, increasing demand can also become a challenge for construction businesses if manual methods, poor monitoring tools, and ill-maintained heavy rental equipment are used in day-to-day rental operations. Automating rental workflows is an important strategy to efficiently manage your heavy rental equipment and benefit from this surging demand.
The manual management of rental equipment presents several key challenges:
- Inaccurate equipment monitoring: Ensuring equipment availability is an important part of managing the flow of rental bookings and catering to the needs of your customers. In addition to inefficiency, manual tracking increases the chance of inaccurate entries with each piece of equipment, due to simple human error. Double-booking is another issue that delays orders, resulting in a bad customer experience and a diminished reputation for your business.
- Reduced on-site safety: The inability to regularly maintain and repair equipment increases the possibility of on-site accidents. This is especially risky with heavy rental equipment because even the smallest error can put the lives of construction workers in danger. With antiquated monitoring methods and irregular maintenance, it is difficult to analyze the condition of rental equipment unless regular audits are carried out, which are costly and often impractical. Providing advanced but poorly maintained equipment is not only dangerous for workers’ safety but damages your business’s long-term sustainability.
- Lack of equipment utilization records: In order to make timely procurement decisions, it is essential for your rental business to know what quantity of equipment has been booked, and in what condition. With a lack of equipment utilization data, it is difficult for you to offer quality rental equipment and ensure that it is matched to customer demand. Inaccurate utilization records can also mean missing insights about a need to acquire equipment that will support entrance into new construction market opportunities.
How can you efficiently manage heavy rental equipment with EZRentOut?
Construction rental business is a highly equipment-driven industry that requires advanced equipment to best execute operations. It is essential for rental businesses to have equipment rental software that enables them to be current with customer demand while efficiently managing heavy equipment rental processes. Here are some key ways in which modern rental software helps:
1. Ensure equipment tracking
Latest technologies, such as barcodes, QR codes can be used to track equipment and gain real-time insights about equipment availability and condition. These modern tracking systems allow you to quickly know your equipment’s location and provide a comprehensive summary of its usage through unique identification numbers. Equipment tagging allows effective inventory management since assets are regularly updated based on their check-ins and check-outs.
Heavy rental equipment software allows you to know where and how your rented equipment is being utilized, which helps avoid misuse as well as ensures safety. For example, EZRentOut includes an equipment tracking module that allows you to know equipment quantity and usage for every checked-out item. This visibility greatly reduces the likelihood of losing high-value equipment because tracking its exact location and availability is always possible.
2. Schedule maintenance
Regular maintenance of heavy rental equipment is an important factor in providing construction business customers with access to optimal performance from rental equipment. This also helps prolong the life cycle of your equipment, which is always more cost-effective than premature replacement. Timely scheduled maintenance prevents long downtimes and unexpected breakdowns and also helps ensure that your equipment is always in top condition. Also, when equipment is under maintenance, it is automatically made unavailable in the system, which prevents incorrect bookings.
EZRentOut allows you to set up recurring maintenance so that each piece of equipment is readily serviced on time, minimizing the delay of bookings. Preventative maintenance can be easily carried out on a regular schedule to ensure that equipment is sent for required work before breakdowns. You can also use the system to schedule separate maintenance for different quantities of the same equipment – for example, you possess two forklifts, but one of them breaks down. You can schedule separate maintenance for that forklift only, without having to schedule maintenance for the other one. This saves time, ensures your equipment is well-maintained and improves your workflows.
3. Customized reports
Staying updated with important metrics on heavy rental equipment helps ensure that you never miss necessary equipment rental trends that are impacting your business. Customized reports present data in an easily understandable way which makes data analysis simpler. For example, visual aids like graphs and charts help simplify the analysis of large data sets. With customized reports, you can build a comprehensive asset portfolio with options to create separate reports for asset maintenance, history, and procurement. Improved data analysis helps generate more actionable insights that enhance your long-term productivity and growth.
4. Theft and equipment loss prevention
A consolidated equipment rental management system is an important tool to reduce thefts of rental equipment at worksites. Not only does it keep track of the equipment, but relevant information is easily accessible through barcode scanning at all times, making it very simple to detect equipment assignees and hold them accountable in case of asset theft or loss.
Heavy rental equipment is especially expensive, and controlling misuse is important to avoid unnecessary costs. In case of theft or loss, the purchase of new equipment can add multiple types of added costs to your business including insurance, licensing, taxes, and transportation. Rental equipment software makes it easier to bypass these issues, and if a concerning situation arises, then the data can be easily matched and reports produced for further action.
5. Process equipment returns
Efficiently managing heavy rental equipment once it has been returned is a major challenge. Rental equipment software allows you to record equipment’s depreciation along with the amount of time for which it has been used to see if it requires any repairs. You can leverage the system to automatically send a rental item for maintenance as soon as it has been returned so that it is ready for another booking. Moreover, the staff is notified when equipment is checked in, and the system updates available for new reservations.
From a planning perspective, these automatic processes facilitate smoother operations- you know exactly when one rental period ends and another one begins. Inventory management also improves since your inventory numbers automatically update based on the number of check ins and check outs. Cloud-based rental software offers a wide variety of features for equipment handling and maintenance that ensure your equipment is always available for check outs in excellent condition.
Read more: 6 Ways To Increase Equipment Rental Business Profitability
Maximize revenue through effective heavy rental equipment handling
The ultimate goal of your construction rental equipment business is to maximize revenue and grow your customer base. Smooth and efficient management of heavy rental equipment makes it easier to achieve these goals, and improves the overall performance of your business.
About EZRentOut
EZRentOut, a cloud-based equipment rental software can help. EZRentOut offers companies in numerous industries seamless rental management along with a host of other features. You can integrate your website with our EZR plug to keep track of all your rental Assets and operations.
