Equipment rental and aftersales agreements nowadays include comprehensive documentation with detailed plans for machine usage, maintenance and repair. Customers are becoming more aware about equipment downtime risks, and so they want to know the maintenance history of machines and the preventive maintenance plan in advance before finalising their rental suppliers.
UAE-based O.rentals, the rental and leasing arm of Al Shirawi Enterprises which has the largest fleet of material handling equipment in the UAE and crawler cranes available for global rental is responding to these demands with a proactive approach to asset management. O.rentals ensures the maximum uptime for their customers by following manufacturer recommendations to a tee for their fleet and using remote fleet monitoring for predictive maintenance.
Rajesh Ramdas, service manager, O.rentals, explains: “Customers are now selective about rental equipment, and their expectations of quality and service are the same as when they buy new machines. In order to deliver on our promise of maximum uptime, we do not compromise on the quality of parts, accessories and service. We supply only genuine spare parts and lubricants, irrespective of the equipment application. One of our largest customer segments is the cold storage industry where we need lubricants that can withstand temperatures as low as –25°C. We often import these lubricants because locally available alternatives do not match the OEM specifications. By following manufacturer recommendations strictly, we are able to focus on market adaptation. Certain parts may underperform the manufacturer’s expectations due to local environmental and working conditions. Our market expertise enables us to understand these specific conditions and offer customised preventive maintenance plans.”
The margins on rental charges will always be limited due to the price sensitivity of the rental market. That’s why ROI expectations should be in line with the asset lifecycle and not short-term gains, according to Rajesh.
“Compromising on maintenance costs just to increase margins is never a good idea. This will eventually increase the costs of breakdown and repairs. As owners of our rental equipment, we know the lifecycles of our different equipment, and we budget maintenance and repair costs accordingly. We also have a plan to replace every equipment at the end of its lifecycle. These costs by themselves would appear high, but by budgeting for them early, we don’t have to deal with unexpected machine failures or breakdowns in the long run,” he says.
Rajesh points out that a machine breakdown should be avoided at all costs because the downtime affects other jobsite operations and the unexpected costs could easily spiral out of control.
“There’s no argument when you realise that cost of breakdown failure is three times that of preventive maintenance and repair. We’ve been able to verify this while analysing our own historical data to understand how we could manage our high maintenance costs. So we apply this principle to all our projects. Our recently completed global crane rental project in Mexico required eight crawler cranes, but it was difficult to import hydraulic parts in Mexico. We ensured that we had the full support of Liebherr in Mexico for supply of parts so that we wouldn’t face equipment breakdown,” says Rajesh.
O.rentals boasts a well-trained team of technical support and service professionals with extensive experience in the Middle East. This combined with advanced fleet management systems for cranes and forklifts is enabling the company offer better customer service. O.rentals uses a modified Liebherr telematics system to monitor its crawler cranes, and analyses the data using the Splunk machine learning software. For forklifts, the company uses an in-house developed fleet management system named Fleetwave.
“Big data and predictive analytics are the game changers in equipment maintenance. We supply crawler cranes with our own operators, technicians and parts as a package deal. This ensures that the equipment is always in good hands. To plan maintenance and repairs during off-peak hours and replace machines without disruption to jobsite operations, we need to rely on machine and jobsite data for advance planning. With regard to material handling equipment, our customers have their own operators. Nevertheless, we monitor every machine in real time and track the operator behaviour to determine ways to reduce wear and tear of parts and recommend training for the operator. We also maintain workshops and stock spare parts and lubricants at all major customer sites. We are among the few rental companies to have a large fleet of traction batteries and in-house battery regenerators. We supply battery packs with battery monitoring systems to track their usage and health, which helps us determine when they need to be serviced or replaced,” says Rajesh.
Machine and jobsite data also helping O.rentals optimise its inventory. Every time a machine returns from a jobsite, it is inspected and repaired before its next job. By having full visibility of the machine utilisation and maintenance history, O.rentals is able to stock parts before the machine arrives, which reduces the turnaround time for the next job.
“Although the pandemic increased the lead times of certain parts temporarily, we have maintained a fill rate of 92%, which is among the best levels in our industry,” he adds.
O.rentals is developing a mobile app to offer it asset maintenance services and enable customers to track the entire maintenance plans for all their equipment.
“In the rental business, preventive measures are never enough. To maximise uptime, we analyse machine data and field service reports constantly to identify potential causes of machine failure and take corrective action. This means we need to use all the technologies and tools at our disposal to ensure that our customers can focus entirely on their core businesses,” says Rajesh.