RER® Magazine: "Maximizing Uptime"

02/18/2005

Alex Schuessler became interested in rental as a young child. Traveling around the world with his father, who worked for a company that was partly owned by Deere and partly by Terex, Schuessler was always around construction equipment. Later as an undergraduate student at Cambridge, and as he earned a Ph.D from Harvard, Schuessler became involved with systems technologies. Later, as he taught at NYU, Schuessler analyzed issues regarding how to take very large amounts of data and make them relevant to users.

That led him to look at the rental industry and its most critical question: How to maximize customers' uptime? The search to solve that issue led Schuessler to develop the technology at the heart of SmartEquip. As it gathers steam and reaches more users, SmartEquip technology might be the most radical, yet simple, method to maximize rental company and manufacturer efficiency and maximum uptime yet invented.

How? In a nutshell, SmartEquip technology allows a rental center that needs a part, for example, to, from its existing management system, look up a required part, serial-number specific to any asset, and view a schematic of the part. It then tells the user what the part is, and by touching it onscreen, can tell the user how many he has in inventory by reading it from its own rental management system. If not in stock, it can instantly arrange manufacturer delivery and have it drop-shipped next day to the rental center or the jobsite. First it tells the user how many the manufacturer has available and asks how many he'd like to order. Gaining that information and ordering the part, which probably would have taken two hours of research at most rental companies (at a 20-percent error rate) but with SmartEquip technology, can be done in five seconds with 100-percent accuracy. The purchase order is generated, the work order is generated, the parts are ordered and sent with 100-percent accuracy, and no books have to be updated; it's all done automatically. No new hardware or software is required. And the same system can be applied to whole goods purchases and configurations of equipment.

The one catch, of course, is that the manufacturer has to also be on the system. It's a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario, but manufacturers are joining in at an accelerating clip and rental companies are catching on to the SmartEquip benefits as well.

It prevents unnecessary inventory buildup, increases uptime significantly, reduces maintenance costs and increases parts accuracy as well. If a manufacturer changes the part ID number, the rental company staff never needs to hear about it, write it down or be concerned about whether or not records were kept — it automatically goes into the SmartEquip system and onto the company's own rental management software.

As important to all SmartEquip users are the costs of transaction, which many manufacturers and rental companies estimate at around $100 per parts order. SmartEquip promises a reduction in cost per transaction of $35 to $75 depending on the customer and the order.

SmartEquip will soon be involved with manufacturers supporting a third-party service network as well.

Schuessler's own academic background is an indication of the quality of thought that has gone into the development of the SmartEquip program, which he began in 2000. He has brought top-quality technology engineers to his organization and is working with some of the industry's most respected manufacturers and most innovative rental companies.

While some skeptics may remain, the proof is in what SmartEquip technology can do. And as it brings in new users at an accelerated pace, it becomes increasingly clear that not only is SmartEquip here to stay, it may dramatically revolutionize the way business is done in the rental industry.

© PRIMEDIA Business Magazines & Media, February 2005.