Austin, TX Ñ March 11, 2003 Ñ Equipment rental company National Equipment Services (NES) has implemented an asset management solution from provider IronRhino in a bid to capitalize on potential savings from improved fleet lifecycle management.
Evanston, Ill.-based NES is the fourth largest company in the $25 billion equipment rental industry. The company focuses on renting more than 750 types of machinery and equipment to industrial and construction end-users from its approximately 190 locations in 34 states and Canada.
The company is implementing IronRhino's Asset Information Manager Plus (AIM+) solution, which the provider said allows managers to optimize their non-core assets by providing a 360-degree view of mobile or remote equipment.
AIM+ collects and aggregates data from existing disparate back-office sources and from on-asset telemetry via wireless data loggers to provide knowledge of equipment assets. By capturing the true historic cost of ownership, along with usage information from day-to-day operations, the solutions help users identify areas of potential savings.
At NES, IronRhino provides online access to fleet managers in the company's 190 locations. From any location, NES managers can look up any of the more than 60,000 owned assets or 10,000 customer assets they manage. With real-time information on schedules, lease status and usage, the managers are better able to make informed decisions about the maintenance and disbursement of their fleets.
"The implementation of IronRhino's AIM+ allows us to use data that is stored in our MTA transaction management system and turn it into information that our managers use in the care, custody and control of our powered mobile equipment (PME) assets," said Bob Bogardus, vice president of national accounts, fleet services and automotive for NES. "The system has highlighted for us, on a global basis, the costs associated with each asset and Ñ unit-by-unit, location-by-location Ñ how we are managing utilization and maintenance against [original equipment manufacturer (OEM)] specifications. We are saving as much as 22 percent in some cases by having this information in a user-friendly format."
Bogardus added that the solution, by allowing the company's Fleet Services group to managing clients' site-based PME fleet assets, is helping to minimize the total lifecycle cost of equipment ownership for NES and its clients.
Implementation of the IronRhino solution took about eight weeks.
