The Background
Industrial door installation, repair and maintenance is part of an around the clock industry whereby working at height is a necessity. Whether working on planned or reactive projects, completion relies on partnering with a varied supply chain and requires a high level of trust in them to work effectively within project timeframes.
The last thing businesses need when hiring MEWPs (mobile elevating work platforms) to work at height is machine delivery delays and/or breakdowns. Often with these issues plans are ruined with teams unable to start work as promised, leads to job cancellations, or impacts scheduling for the next jobs, which seriously strains internal and customer relationships.
The Non-Negotiable
Our customer works on a high volume of industrial door jobs each month across the UK, in areas such as warehousing, manufacturing, among others, and hire hundreds of access machines per quarter. With this volume of hiring, the stakes are high where powered access delivery delays and breakdowns can have a huge impact on scheduling and output. Which can lead to project margin being squeezed through unplanned additional re-hiring, administration, and contractor costs. Not to mention the disruption to customers.
A Strategic Supplier Assessment That Would Ultimately Pay Off!
The time had come for our customer to do a review of their supply chain, of which powered access hire was under scrutiny. A strategic exercise done to see if operational efficiencies needed to be improved, and costs stabilised by trialling alternative suppliers.
This resulted in searching for reliable powered access solutions and coming across Horizon Platform’s hire service that is bolstered by 8 service commitments.
After getting to know more about us and meeting with our team, including visiting our super-depot in Normanton in West Yorkshire to do their full due diligence, they agreed to switch 30% of their hire needs to Horizon initially.
Horizon Platforms’ customer onboarding team got to work quickly which resulted in the customers’ team receiving machines within hours and having no negative impact or delay to their operations.
Within a few weeks, the customer benefitted from Horizon’s efficiency with delays and issues being rare. That resulted in them switching 100% of their powered access hiring to Horizon Platforms.
| No. of Machines Hired | No. of Deliveries | No. of Hire Days | Late Deliveries | Breakdowns | % Trouble Free Hire Days |
| 197 | 192 | 380 | 1 | 3 | 98.9% |
The Digital Revolution
The customer requested that Horizon were only to accept orders with purchase orders and verbal orders could not be accepted. This request was part of their need to have a ‘paper trail’ on the large volume of machines they hire for operational schedule and budget tracking reasons.
With this in mind, to make life easier for them, their account manager at Horizon suggested using HireHub, a free-to-use portal available to all Horizon customers. HireHub provides customers with full control and visibility of all aspects of hiring scissor lifts and cherry pickers, with the option to use it exclusively or in addition to working with account managers.
HireHub appealed to their buyers, so our HireHub experts visited their office and conducted a demonstration, where they were shown how to:
- Get quotes, order, off-hire, and extend hires.
- Monitor what is on hire and where
- Locate invoices and track hire spend.
- Access the hire stats dashboard where they can track our supply performance.
They were so pleased with HireHub they now place most of their orders through the portal. But still have regular communication with their account manager, as well as our customer experience team.
Service Always Matters
If you don’t take a strategic look at the performance of your supply chain and stick with the status quo there could be undiscovered opportunities that could improve efficiencies or save you money.
There are always administrative, time, and financial impacts following late deliveries and machine failure which can negatively affect your bottom line or your ability to win repeat business. Our plea is, don’t put up with it! At Horizon Platforms we support our customers with a great service to allow them to work effectively and safely at height no matter what.
From our super-depot in West Yorkshire and via our partner network, we guarantee high service standards and platform-quality. In fact, on average across all deliveries UK-wide 98% are trouble-free. And no, this isn’t just ‘cross-hire’.
So, if you are ready to experience our unrivalled service contact our team.