Overview
Enhancing asset management
Kennards Hire, a leading Australian family-owned supplier of hire equipment and workforce services, has taken steps to meet increasing business demands. With over 1,600 employees and a fleet of 120,000 assets, the company sought a solution to better track and manage their equipment across customer sites.
Angus Kennard, from Kennards Hire, emphasized the need to add value by ensuring reliable equipment availability where customers need it. The company aimed to deliver on their service promise and make their customers’ jobs easier.
To achieve this, they implemented a solution that provides greater visibility and insight into their asset fleet while it operates on-site.
The move toward enhanced asset management reflects Kennards Hire’s commitment to delivering exceptional service and improving the overall customer experience.
Challenge
Revolutionising the rental environment
In partnership with Telstra Purple, Kennards Hire needed to address a number of key issues that were deemed critical to the ongoing success of its enterprise.
The complicated hiring experience was uncovered as a key obstacle to customer and employee satisfaction.
Kennards receives approximately 10,000 inbound calls and makes approximately 3,000 outbound calls, in order to manage more than 3,200 hires across 180+ branches every day.
The lack of visibility of an asset's location and its performance while operating on customer sites, was also a key factor in creating a solution to improve the experience for customers and employees alike.
Addressing these factors would not only aim to rectify the complexity of the hiring experience but was also imperative to delivering on Kennards Hire’s service promise.
Solution
A bespoke digital platform to monitor asset performance
Telstra Purple and Kennards Hire worked collaboratively with their team in an agile environment, to design and deploy Easytrak - a bespoke IoT solution to monitor the location and performance of each asset.
Easytrak is a hyper IoT platform built and deployed on Microsoft Azure which aggregates data inputs from vehicles, sensors on plant equipment, wearables, and environmental sensors.
As part of the process Telstra Purple and Kennards Hire:
- collaborated within an agile environment to accelerate application development.
- co-created a unified asset tracking system enabling faster and more efficient asset management using predictive analytics, predictive maintenance, remote monitoring, and operational intelligence.
- designed and deployed a digital platform for Kennards Hire’s operations team to monitor and interact with assets. The platform raises required alerts and notifications about the assets and provides data visualisation for live data flowing from the devices alongside the data from the Kennards Hire Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
In essence, the solution enables an asset to continuously transmit operational and environmental data into a centralised digital platform that monitors and manages equipment usage, location, and operational conditions. This data is processed providing insights to branch staff, call centres, and customers, and integrates the ERP system.
Easytrak allows our staff to serve our customers more efficiently. It gives them near real-time insights into the operational state of the assets that are out on hire... things such as: is it low on fuel, is it overheating, is it moving outside of working hours? These can be turned into actionable alerts that are sent to our staff at the branch or even our call centre that operates 24/7.
Mitch Hirsch
IT Infrastructure Manager - Kennards Hire
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