Kennards Hire is Australia’s leading family-owned supplier of hire equipment and workforce as a service, with over 1,600 employees and 120,000 fleet assets. Facing increasing business demands, Kennards Hire was seeking a better way to track and manage their assets across customer sites and offer a better experience to their people and their customers.  

“We need to ensure that we are adding value by having available, reliable equipment when and where our customers need it and deliver on our service promise to make our customer’s job easy. We needed a solution that would give our staff and customers greater visibility and insight into our asset fleet as it was operating on site,” said Angus Kennard, Kennards Hire.

Key issues

• Complex hiring experience with over 10,000 inbound and 3,000 outbound calls to manage more than 3,200 hires across 180+ branches every day
• Lack of visibility of asset location and performance while operating on customer sites.
• Improving the hiring experience for customers and employees and delivering on Kennards Hire’s service promise.

Solution

Telstra Purple listened to the challenges Kennards Hire was experiencing and worked collaboratively with their team in an agile environment to design and deploy Easytrak − a bespoke IoT solution to monitor the location and performance of each asset.  

Easytrak is a hyper IoT platform built and deployed on Microsoft Azure which aggregates data inputs from vehicles, sensors on plant equipment, wearables, and environmental sensors. The solution enables an asset to continuously transmit operational and environmental data into a centralised digital platform that monitors and manages equipment usage, location and operational conditions. This data is processed providing insights to branch staff, call centres, and customers and integrates with Kennards Hires Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.  

“Easytrak allows our staff to serve our customers more efficiently. It gives them near-real time insights into the operational state of the assets that are out on hire… things such as is it low on fuel, is it overheating, is it moving outside of working hours? These can be turned into actionable alerts that are sent to our staff at the branch or even our call centre that operates 24/7,” said Mitch Hirsch, IT Infrastructure Manager at Kennards Hire.

As part of the process we:

• Collaborated with Kennards Hire in an agile environment to accelerate application development
• Co-created a unified asset tracking system enabling faster and more efficient asset management using predictive analytics, predictive maintenance, remote monitoring and operational intelligence.  
• Designed and deployed a digital platform for Kennards Hire’s operations team to monitor and interact with assets. The platform raises required alerts and notifications about the assets and provides data visualisation for live data flowing from the devices alongside the data from the enterprise ERP system.

Outcome

“Our collaboration with Telstra Purple has enabled us to move from being more than just a hire company to be a solution service provider to help our customers achieve greater efficiency, greater safety and environmental performance,” said Angus Kennard. 

Through the development of Easytrak Telstra Purple has helped Kennards Hire achieve:

• A better experience for employees and customers - All assets and its movements are tracked providing high fleet visibility to customers and employees, minimising phone calls and eliminating equipment theft. Customers can spend more time doing what they do best and less time worrying about whether the equipment they are using on site is serviced, safe and ready to use.
• Improved safety and compliance – Safety and compliance is assured by monitoring driver behaviour such as harsh acceleration, braking, roll detection and cornering of vehicles to prevent accidents. Analytics and insights are helping Kennards Hire improve safety and reinforce good employee behaviour.
• Transport optimisation – Kennards can now connect their fleet by tracking the geolocation of delivery vehicles to verify deliveries, pick-ups, and drop off locations. 

“We think we've just scratched the surface when it comes to technologies and enabling that for the future. And we see Telstra Purple really helping us to make that easy for ourselves and our customers for the future,” said Angus Kennard.