Point of Rental CEO Wayne Harris talked with Peggy Smedley of ConExpo-Con/AGG radio about rental software’s impact on the construction industry on May 2. The full interview can be found on their website, but here are some highlights (and some answers that didn’t make it into the interview):
On construction industry happenings and Point of Rental’s work since his last appearance on the podcast:
Everybody’s pretty excited in the construction industry – everywhere around here seems to be building. I just got back from our Australian office and they’re building as fast as they can build down there, so it’s not just North America. We’ve got growth happening all over the world. It’s been great.
On technology turning unproductive jobs into productive ones:
Money is a limited resource. Some might have more than others, but no matter what company you’re at, it’s limited. We’d much rather invest money on hiring new employees, improving processes, or profit – not putting it into something we never needed in the first place.
The dollars that you’re spending right now pushing paper around, you can either have as a profit, or you can reinvest it into your company to do something more productive.
On decreasing downtime:
Decreasing downtime starts with proper maintenance of the equipment. With rental software, you’re able to keep maintenance schedules more easily – you can load the maintenance schedule and track the hours or mileage on the machines, send out a maintenance person to take care of work that can be done on-site or send replacements before a piece of equipment needs to come back to be worked on.
It also helps with seeing what’s available throughout the organization. We see idle equipment so often on lots – sometimes another site needs that piece of equipment, but if they don’t know it’s there, they’re buying a new one or renting one, when all they had to do was transfer it between locations.
On advancements in equipment tracking since he grew up working in his parents’ rental store:
AEMP has come out with a new standard that in addition to hour meter reading and GPS location, you can now get fault codes, fuel usage, idle time, among others. Wouldn’t it be great to be notified that a light tower out on a job is overheating? Or one of your foremen comes to ask to buy another generator. You can pull up on the map where all your generators are.
We’ve also been working on what we’re calling an Inspection App, which will allow managers to create templates that include standard inspection requirements, eliminating the need for paper checklists and allowing all inspection information to be easily sorted and accessed by the people who need it. If a high-priority task doesn’t pass inspection, a repair order will automatically be generated, the item gets removed from inventory, and maintenance can get to work repairing it. You can create inspections for each level of maintenance as well, so your mechanic knows exactly what needs to be done on the 500-hour maintenance.