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EquipmentShare : Robust Fleet Management Solutions for Enhancing Jobsite Visibility
Willy Schlacks, Co-Founder and PresidentThis is where EquipmentShare takes center stage. With its equipment rental solutions and robust fleet management technology, the company helps contractors increase productivity and gain powerful insights into their fleet operation.
In an interview with CIO Applications, WillySchlacks, Co- Founder and President of EquipmentShare, explains how their award-winning fleet management technology solution helps contractors gain a holistic view of people, assets, fleet and materials.
Could you give us an overview of EquipmentShare?
Back when I was a general contractor, I witnessed firsthand how the construction industry struggles to obtain real-time insights on jobsite activities. Most contractors relied on ERP data to gain insights on their business months after a job was completed. This was due to the disconnect among the three verticals within the construction environment— assets, people, and materials. There was no platform to connect all these aspects and create visibility into that environment in real-time. Recognizing this, I, along with my brother, Jabbok, started EquipmentShare in 2014. Initially, we focused on connecting the asset vertical into a data lake and leveraging that connectivity to monetize data for contractors. However, we realized the need to build solutions to solve every problem associated with the construction ecosystem. So, we shifted our focus to creating a platform that could ensure seamless connectivity among different assets, people, and materials. This is how the foundation stone of EquipmentShare was finally set.
What are the challenges that you are currently observing in the marketplace?
There are thousands of technology solutions in the construction industry to solve problems like stagnant productivity levels and poor project performance. This implies a lack of cohesion among the different solutions. Most of our customers, especially the enterprises, want to use as few solutions as possible to solve the maximum number of issues. Therefore, we are focused on creating a data lake that connects a contractor’s assets, people, and materials. This allows our clients to gain holistic insights into their budget trends and make accurate future projections, such as revenue generation.
Regardless of the asset's ownership, contractors can obtain the data and visibility into their fleet automatically using our platform
Our platform is a suite of applications that are mature within the asset spectrum. Our fleet management solution offers a single dashboard and numerous tools for contractors and construction companies to manage their owned and rented fleets. Regardless of the asset's make or model, contractors can obtain critical data on their fleet using our platform. We use different technologies such as near-field technology, Bluetooth, GPS, and predictive intelligence to connect these assets and ensure visibility into a fleet's current status in real-time.
By providing the necessary data at their fingertips, we help clients make intelligent choices and informed decisions quickly related to their assets. More importantly, our platform focuses on digitizing and streamlining workflows for contractors across a variety of realms, including e-logs, work orders, and creating equipment usage reports. Whether it is assets or workers (in the field or office), these workflow tools track the status and activities of everyone and everything. Our platform provides clients with business intelligence and delivers comprehensive reports through dashboards for a real-time perspective of activities on jobsites.
On the materials spectrum, we have many applications that are in the beta testing phase. We will launch these by the next quarter of 2021. These applications are focused on the purchasing side of materials and cost factors.
Since a considerable part of our business is renting equipment, we embed our technology into every rental asset in our fleet. So when contractors rent our machine, they can unlock a large amount of data that helps them save money and gain real-time insights, visibility, and control across all their fleet.
Could you give us a customer success story?
A Missouri-based civil construction company with more than 25,000 equipment assets had a lack of clarity around maintenance and fleet management operations. They took a reactive approach to maintenance, wasting resources and time because they lacked transparency into their assets. Despite using more than five software systems to manage their fleet, the client struggled to track and monitor their machines’ health and plan maintenance effectively.
We moved all of their asset data into one single technology platform and combined it with employee data to create a big picture of jobsite productivity. We helped them understand service events to reduce breakdowns, increase utilization, and boost their ROI. We integrated our fleet management technology with their existing legacy software systems to accurately track their fleet's GPS location, which saved them significant time and money.
What are the key factors that differentiate EquipmentShare from other market players?
We are introspective about numerous aspects that enable us to solve our customers' problems. Our focus is to enhance our capability to drive value for customers by understanding their problems and then develop features or solutions accordingly. New issues such as rising costs and labor shortages keep coming up in our industry, and we are building innovative and meaningful solutions to deal with them.
What does the future look like for EquipmentShare?
We intend to launch our software platform worldwide in the next 12 months and are also continually expanding our facilities to various locations in order to meet the demand for brick-and-mortar equipment rental. Additionally, we are continuously evolving our offerings to broaden the connection across assets, people, and materials so that clients can gain insights into their business in real-time.
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