Nickell Rental Joins SmartEquip, Citing Productivity, Improved Utilization
SmartEquip’s Enterprise application will now be used by Nickell Rental, one of the largest independent equipment rental companies in the southeast. Nickell Rental will be able to automate its service process, increase technician productivity, eliminate parts order errors and improve uptime and availability of its rental fleet. The integration of SmartEquip with Orion Software’s Sirius rental management system will allow the family owned company to automate workflow for parts and service and leverage integrations with more than 280 manufacturers and suppliers of equipment that participate in the SmartEquip network.
“While local, independent rental companies often have an advantage over the national companies in terms of understanding the local market and relationships with local and other businesses, they are often at a disadvantage in terms of being able to access new technology,” said Josh Nickell, vice president of Nickell Rentals. “For some time, we have watched as the national rental companies have used SmartEquip to become more competitive by automating the repair and maintenance work flow, and we’ve looked forward to being able to use that same technology in our own business. We clearly recognize that optimizing the utilization of not only our fleet, but also our staff, is critical for growth and continued success. SmartEquip technology will enable Nickell Rental to replace our paper-based work order and purchase order systems with a paperless, automated system that eliminates over half of the steps in our current repair and maintenance process, not only reducing costs, but also improving productivity of both technicians and parts administrators. In addition, we believe that using SmartEquip technology to compress repair times will result in improved fleet availability for our customers and revenues for Nickell Rental.”
“Our goal is to drive increased profitability for fleet owners, manufacturers and their dealers by integrating both their procurement systems and operational processes,” said Fernando Pinera, SmartEquip president. “We’re excited that Nickell Rental, as one of the nation’s leading independent rental companies, will now use SmartEquip technology to support their operations.”
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.