Compliance is vital in the hire industry, not just for your business' reputation and performance but also for your customers' health and safety. Accidents involving non-compliant equipment could leave you liable for prosecution and massive fines. Whilst equipment breaking down could impact your customer's already very tight deadline. The process of keeping your equipment compliant doesn't have to be a laborious one. With the right rental software package, you can transform your reactive processes to being proactive, while ensuring your equipment is always safe and certified for use.
Here are some of the ways that a rental software solution can boost efficiency when it comes to keeping your equipment compliant:
Maximising utilisation
Having scheduled equipment maintenance plans can prevent costly equipment breakdowns whilst maximising equipment utilisation. Routine maintenance can be based on hours, or usage intervals, with reminders when a service is due. You could even exclude equipment from your inventory if a service is scheduled during the rental period, removing the risk of vital maintenance being overlooked. With the power of foresight and a planned equipment maintenance schedule, you can ensure your equipment is always compliant and in tip-top condition, saving you time and money down the line.
Inspections to keep your equipment safe and ready to hire
When it comes to inspecting your equipment post-rental, you can use compulsory checklists to ensure that engineers complete every inspection process step. This helps to reduce the likelihood of breakdowns whilst with the customer.
Why not go one step further with ensuring your rental assets' reliability and safety? By performing additional equipment inspections post-rental, on top of any statutory inspections, any flags of upcoming issues can be quickly recorded. The equipment can then be booked for further work to be carried out if necessary.
With the power of a rental management system, you can set notifications and alerts when statutory tests are due, so that they never get missed. Certificates from these tests could even be stored against the item in your central rental management system to show its compliance history all in one place.
Removing paper and increasing your workshop efficiency
Paper-based records are easily lost, laborious to complete, often not accurate, and not to mention challenging to share. Going paperless will allow your business to have easily accessible service history records, which can be shared between depots. Any works orders, replacement parts, service history, and PAT tests for your rental equipment can be recorded and tracked against each asset in your rental management solution. This will give you crystal clear visibility of the current health and history of your equipment.
Maintaining a complete electronic service history means that should a fault or an accident occur involving that equipment, you can quickly prove that machine's service intervals and its compliance with legislation.
Having a suitable workshop solution for your rental business can give you the peace of mind that every time equipment leaves your depot, it is safe for the customer and compliant to regulations. Having all records easily accessible provides greater transparency of the workshop, helping to increase efficiency.
If you want to find out more about how a workshop solution can help your business succeed, read our concise guide "Using a workshop solution to optimise your asset lifecycle and boost revenue".