United Rentals – Twimbit DX 2021 Rank 3

Outcome

Key Highlights

Introduction

The United Rentals digital ecosystem, with capabilities that include telematics, online self-service tools, and benchmarking equipment utilisation, provides powerful solutions to help companies. By putting actionable data into the hands of more people, the company drives business productivity and transforms how work gets done. The company has also expanded its vertical expertise. The expansion covers how contractors build data centres and power companies refresh transmission and distribution systems. These steps improve customer’s value proposition and rental equipment consumption rates.

Transformation

The story began three-and-a-half years ago when United launched an online rental reservation system that made it possible for customers to rent equipment online. What was extraordinary was the fact that the system was fully automated.

As Hummel explained, “Traditionally, what happened – and still happens in most cases – is you use the web as a kind of lead form. You fill out a form, but a human has to connect to it and look it over and make sure that they can take the order. Whereas what we did was we set up an algorithm, a set of business logic, that under normal conditions allowed us to take the order automatically.”

The key to this was the ability to assess equipment availability, which was a key challenge on a real-time basis.

The second part of the story is about improving the way people ‘consume’ rental equipment. For more than 20 years, United has had a proprietary rental management system called Total Control, which gives customers access to account information. The information includes bills, invoices and rental contracts and also helps customers locate equipment and manage costs.

The system has seen various upgrades in that time, and it is now feeding into something that United has begun to delve into more deeply: business intelligence. Total Control allows customers to benchmark their performance, analyse utilisation and identify where money is salvageable.

“We often talk about getting a 20% cost saving for customers when they use Total Control, which is not a software that we charge for but is a software that we provide to the bulk of our largest customers. And there are some pieces of it that are also open to all customers,” says Hummel.

The number of customers using the company’s e-commerce offering rose from about 11,000 in 2017 to around 31,000 in 2018. Although the figure may not triple every year, it is still growing significantly.

The new app is a gateway to the cloud-based jobsite performance tool by United. Total Control, which gives visibility of both rented and owned equipment in a customer’s fleet, is a game game-changer in the industry.

The design of the app allows it to help customers better manage their fleets and improve business efficiency. Each customer has a personalised dashboard to monitor their equipment in real-time, track rentals and share equipment across job sites. A critical feature of the new app is the way it streamlines the off-renting process. Customers can return the equipment with the click of a button at any time of day. They receive instant confirmation, thus reducing the risk of discrepancies.