Maintaining Equipment

New Ideas to manage Equipment Maintenance

Keeping your equipment running safely

In the current economic situation, keeping the equipment you have running efficiently and for longer, is absolutely essential. Managing your equipment maintenance is vitally important to keeping your customers happy, preventing breakdowns and minimizing costs.

If you can ensure that your equipment maintenance system provides accurate warnings of pending issues, keeps track of all scheduled maintenance events, allows you to accurately track costs and engineers and that you have a clear picture of outstanding maintenance actions then you keep your fleet running safely. If you can use the same system to provide added benefits to your customers including maintaining their equipment and providing accurate billing directly from the service system then you can also offer your company added value.

rentalresult offers a number of key features to support you and your equipment

scheduled maintenance

At the heart of our maintenance system is the ability to define maintenance schedules for all of your equipment, maintenance events can be a simple visual inspection with a need to record simply that a machine has been checked, or complex work order events where parts and labor need to be recorded in detail. You can even add an electronic test sheet for your maintenance event and store the questions and responses in the system. For equipment needing test or examination certificates you can manage those here too. The key to all of the schedule maintenance events is that you can use them to plan parts requirements, engineer time and even to trigger further service events.

asset controller

In order to ensure that at every point you have an absolute and clear view of all your assets, their maintenance requirements and any conflicts that are likely to arise from planned or current rental activity we have designed the asset controller. This single screen gives you a diary view of your assets, their status and allows you to work interactively to assign work orders, update service actions as well as use a huge variety of filters to identify likely problems, conflicts and overdue actions.

Warranty tracking

Manufacturers hold provisions for warranties in their books, yet very few people actively claim for their warranty repairs and maintenance. The rentalresult system allows you to track warranties against every asset, and against every part allowing you to understand how much you could be claiming on warranties, and allowing you to track and bill for warranties if you wish directly from within work orders.

Customer owned asset repairs

Of course, if you have an excellent service department, one of the ways you may wish to maximize your mechanic utilization and customer service is by offering customer repairs and maintenance. The rentalresult application allows you not only to manage these options against your customer’s assets, but you can also automatically provide extended warranty’s for products you’ve sold to your customers. You can manage your customer work orders on both a time and materials or a fixed price basis with automatic customer billing if required.

Inventory and Back Ordering

If you wish to maintain a full inventory management system then rentalresult has one built in within the work order and servicing applications allowing you to back order stock for particular work orders and to manage inventory locations. Our back ordering function also allows you to create back-to-back or linked purchase orders to external vendors to do your actual servicing or repairs as well as purely for parts management.

customer service calls

We’ve put customer service at the heart of our systems, with customer service calls allowing you to monitor all communications between your customers and your business no matter what the cause. That means you can track calls against assets on rent, on customer breakdowns and on customer requests for servicing of their own equipment – no matter what the subject you can capture the information and you can react immediately.

Initiate Business Processes

Directly from a customer service call you can trigger a pick up of equipment, a swap out, or an engineer visit to the customer site with a Work Order to record all of their findings. Our control centers are designed to ensure that the rest of the business, including your sales teams are aware of customer issues and breakdown calls the moment they happen.

Business Rules Engine

You can also build your own breakdown scripts to assist your employees in identifying problems before sending out expensive engineers. Scripts which can identify common problems, and provide work arounds without needing to swap out equipment or necessarily visit the site. Breakdown scripts can be integrated into customer service calls to ensure detailed recording of all the information that the engineer needs to ensure he has the right parts and the right manuals for the problem.

Integrated Reporting Solution

Our integrated reporting solution allows you to track larger patterns across the system, so frequent breakdowns by equipment type, frequently replaced parts, average response time for breakdowns etc can be tracked for performance targets. The reporting tools also allow you to track key cost management elements such as warranty claims, external repairs, customer SLAs etc