Overview
An Australia-based company dedicated to the hiring and renting of high-value heavy machinery such as rollers, water trucks, tractor brooms, tractor grids, and other mobile site amenities across Australia for more than two decades, has been steadily growing in their business. The company offers its services in three states in Australia moving and renting equipment based in regional areas.
A recent uptick in growth meant business leaders needed to look at how operations could be streamlined in moving and maintaining equipment to continue encouraging growth without overspending in support of it, as well as saving on cost losses from theft or damage upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Challenge
As the company continued to grow, it got harder to keep up with the maintenance and usage of the gear. The organization’s technicians were manually monitoring the usage and maintenance of machines.
From a usage standpoint, it was important to understand how much the equipment had been used regarding customer billing, as well as making sure that the equipment was used properly, not damaged, and within the contracted rental agreements.
For maintenance, technicians had to visit the equipment every four to six weeks to get readings on machine health to perform routine maintenance or to detect any issues or faults.
Additionally, it was getting more and more challenging to keep visibility on equipment as it moved around from one site to the next, and oftentimes, equipment was transported overnight and during the weekend, so off-hours visibility was required. From a logistics standpoint, knowing where equipment was traveling to and from is critical, and then from a security perspective, having visibility and tracking capabilities became crucial, as well.
Many of the locations the company services are very remote, which creates an opportunity for the high-value equipment to be stolen.
The organization realized that they needed a remote asset monitoring solution powered through IoT to provide visibility, security, and logistics streamlining to support their growing business. Finding the right connectivity that could move with equipment and still be supported in remote locations was going to be part of the challenge in creating a strong and comprehensive asset monitoring solution.
The Solution
KORE provided hardware (including routers and antennas) that drive high reliability “smart roaming” technology, as well as multi-network, resilient connectivity for full coverage in all locations. KORE has enabled charging stations to connect to 2G, 3G, and 4G across all network operators, which means more comprehensive coverage no matter the network conditions.
The Result
The organization can now track its more than 400 pieces of equipment with visibility into location and usage. This supports the security and logistics elements in knowing where equipment is, and it also supports the billing and usage elements for business operations, as well as maintenance and monitoring of machine health.
The company is given push notifications on machine performance and health so that when site visits are needed for repair or maintenance are needed, technicians have already assessed the situation before reaching the site. Additionally, if an error is occurring, like overheating, the user of the equipment might not know this is taking place. The company can receive this information and pass it along to the user, so they can stop using the machine to prevent damage to the equipment.
By creating this type of failsafe measure, the organization can save on total losses on equipment, which can add up to hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars per unit.
Overall, the asset monitoring solution from KORE has helped the company to streamline operations and ultimately save money via preventative maintenance and guarding against theft. It can cost tens of thousands in Australian dollars to replace stolen trailers.
