Top 10 services to look out for when selecting a plant hire supplier.

An effective construction project relies on contractor knowledge, skill and ability. Selection of a good supply partner will also help to reduce site downtime, increase efficient man hours and help you to eliminate damage charges upon off hire.

So how do you identify the best hire suppliers and ensure that you are reaping the maximum number of benefits that you can?

Services for before you hire.

1) A good Technical Sales Team.

Any good supplier must have a highly educated and technically capable sales team, who have industry experience and have undergone in depth training to ensure that they are able to understand and evaluate a clients capabilities and requirements, allowing them to recognise when extra support is going to be required.

They will listen to your requirements and be able to offer guidance towards the best kit to use.

2) Scheme Design and Site Visits

For those clients that need assistance with scheme design there must be a provision for this from the supplier, a good supply partner will provide this free of charge. They will be armed with teams of engineers distributed across the country to ensure local knowledge is utilised and applied to every project. They will not only design a scheme but be free to visit the site when necessary to ensure maximum understanding of site conditions allowing the safest and most cost efficient scheme to be engineered.

This will also ensure that your quote for hire is accurate, based on a bespoke design to specific and current site conditions and will not increase post tender because a template scheme has been proposed.

3) Technical Supplies

For those clients with their own engineering teams a good supplier will ensure provision of a Technical Reference guide along containing all relevant loadings and properties for their kit along with CAD Blocks for all of their equipment. This will allow in house engineering teams to speedily compile technically correct designs that will also provide a full specification list of requirements to hire.

This means that from inception a scheme can be designed with the peace of mind that it is safe and fit for purpose, the design can then be passed on to procurement with exact kit codes and numbers allowing a smooth hire to proceed with minimal time delay and no interpretation or substitution necessary. Again these services will be free of charge.

4 ) Training

A supplier that recognises the pressures on their clients and wants to offer all the support you need will ensure that they can provide competency training of you and your workforce, either on site or off site, prior to the hire to educate the teams towards best use and best practise.

This training has a greater benefit than purely health and safety, a workforce educated in best practice can save you £’s by reducing the amount of damages to kit and thus incurred by you and also by increasing the effective man-hours on site which means faster completion and more time to complete other projects. A good plant hirer will provide all of this as part of their complementary service.

Always beware -  a bad supplier will quote low and recoup their losses by excessive damage charges!

5 ) Quality and maintenance of equipment

Equipment must be checked and certified as safe to use where appropriate your supplier will be able to provide you with evidence of their maintenance procedures should you request it. They will also be able to demonstrate a “pro-active” approach to their equipment maintenance which goes above and beyond the requirements that the law imposes upon them, although this is not a legal requirement, they will take pride in the equipment they hire and your safety is of paramount importance ensuring that they will have strict and comprehensive in-house procedures.

This again works to save you £’s, correctly maintained, and pro actively treated equipment minimises the possibility of un reasonable “wear and tear” damage charges being applied upon off hire.

 

Services to look for during hire

6) User Guides

Provision of clear and concise User Guides is one of the most basic requirements you should expect. These will detail everything from loadings and properties, how to unload the delivery and how to construct the kit, all the way through to extracting it and best practise for reloading onto the vehicle for return to your suppliers depot.

7) Installation Guides

A good supply partner will provide multiple levels of information in different delivery methods and will find a way of ensuring that the information for installation always makes its way to the person that is actually working with the equipment as well as the User Guide that will more than likely end up in a site office.

Installation Guides will be supplied along with equipment and be designed to reach the end user specifically. The Guides will usually be physically attached to the kit being delivered and will contain more details on best practise instructions to follow for installation in a digestible and easy to follow pictorial format, perfect for a quick refresh on site.

8) Installation Videos

Teamed with the installation guides and user guides a good supply partner will have the ability to provide best practise installation and working videos, to ensure any clients needing a more in depth instruction or even just a working visual reminder have access to what they need. These will be quickly and easily accessible via smart phone or computer to ensure that your workforce has every opportunity to access best practise and work with the added peace of mind of a “live” tutorial.

9) Site Demonstrators

A further support offered by the best plant hirers is a Site Demonstrator service, whereby a dedicated and specially trained member of the suppliers team will attend site to demonstrate to your work force installation and best practise, this is especially useful for infrequently used and more complex equipment such as culvert pullers.

They will attend site at your convenience to physically show and guide how to construct and use the kit on hire. This allows your teams to ask as many questions as necessary and really understand the best methods where perhaps the kit has not been previously used and time has not been available for a more formal training course.

10) On Hire Support

Your supply partner should also be able to offer you follow up services from their engineering and sales teams to projects while onsite, to alleviate any worries or issues that might arise.

They will have team members available to be called to site at short notice and located locally for quick response times and to ensure that they have a working knowledge of your site conditions. Your supplier will invest in a highly informed help or customer services desk that will be able to deal with queries quickly and efficiently having undergone training experiencing real site conditions and
their own competency training to maximise their potential to assist..


There are many, many more questions to be asked and answered; these are just our top ten. In fact there is a list of points and questions that could be put together for each of the top ten listed here!

Ultimately be very thorough in your research, and be aware of what is out there that you can expect to receive, ask lots of questions, and if you are not sure then ask more questions, don’t get pushed around by anyone and ensure that everything that you can utilise as a benefit to you and your workforce is made available and maximised to the full!