Background
Mr Plant Hire was founded in 1981 by David Elsdon. They’re dedicated to ensuring top-quality plant, an excellent level of service, and an unequivocal commitment to safety. They supply the construction, maintenance, mechanical and electrical industries around London with high-quality tools and machinery. They also have a large Powered Access division covering the entire U.K.
Problem
Often, the only time you really dive deep into how you have your software and your processes set up is when you’re implementing something new or something is broken. Mr Plant Hire had set up their software so it fit their operations when they started. But over the years, the company had grown; technology and the software itself had evolved. They adapted, but never really went back to question the original setup.
Solution
In early 2023, they heard about Point of Rental’s new business consulting offering and scheduled a visit to go through their operations and identify opportunities to improve their efficiency.
Results
Point of Rental’s consulting starts before anyone sets foot on-site.
The consultant reached out to Mr Plant Hire General Manager Steven King to work through objectives and see what Mr Plant Hire was hoping to achieve. That was followed up with a dive into the system via TeamViewer to see some of the settings in an “under-the-bonnet tinkering,” as King put it.
Those meetings helped the consultant build up a plan to maximise his visit to Mr Plant Hire’s locations and work with King to ensure the right people would be in the building at the right time.
Day-of, there were several on-the-spot bits of advice that made an immediate impact. The big value, however, came in the form of a post-visit report detailing the challenges Mr Plant Hire faced and how best to tackle them in their situation, based on the consultant’s industry experience as well as his experience implementing Point of Rental in other businesses.
“I’ve dealt with software people over the years, and they know their software inside-out. Obviously, I know what we do as a business,” said Steven. “But [the Point of Rental consultant] knew both, and that made it really easy for him to talk in the right language to me, but also to the people in the office that he was exploring it with.”
That deeper-level understanding helped make the recommendations easier to implement.
“I now know what we need to do differently to get to where I need to get to – which areas of the system we need to overhaul, how we do it, why we need to do it, and more importantly, how we do it right going forward,” Steven said.
So what’s Steven’s advice for someone who’s on the fence about whether or not Point of Rental’s hire consulting services are right for them?
“If you think you’re doing it [using the software] wrong, you probably are, so get some help,” said Steven. “And if you’re using other software on a day-to-day basis, I really would explore what’s held within the system already. You can take out all the human error of transferring data and all the potential problems that brings in.”