Sunbelt Rentals Transforms Its Business with IoT Fleet Management

Sunbelt provides rental equipment to customers across a variety of industries, including construction, facilities maintenance, events, disaster relief, and specialty applications. Its business depends on its workforce efficiently delivering rental services through a fleet of more than 600,000 assets made by hundreds of different original equipment manufacturers. The fleet includes aerial work platforms, forklifts, earthmoving equipment, pumps and power generation equipment, scaffolding, contractor tools, climate control equipment, and more.

The company was already adept at managing its equipment and data, but it recognized that significant efficiency gains could come from unifying its systems and information. Focused on innovation, operational excellence, and continuous improvement, the company sought to optimize its operations, deliver a better customer experience, and help customers unlock greater value from renting equipment instead of owning it.

Sunbelt had incorporated connected equipment throughout its fleet. However, the size and diversity of the fleet made it difficult to manage data pulled from numerous OEMs and third-party IoT data providers. Teams had to use several different applications and systems to register equipment and monitor asset health, limiting their ability to unlock the full value of operational data.

The company recognized that aggregating and using data from all its assets on a single platform could produce insights capable of driving significant operational improvements. One of the largest opportunities was in service operations, where more than 4,000 technicians needed the right equipment telematics data at the right time. Putting equipment health information in technicians’ hands could reduce the time required to diagnose and repair equipment while improving the quality of the work.

Additional challenges included: 

• Time-consuming asset retrieval: The company conservatively estimated that each branch lost an hour every day locating and picking up equipment.
• Off-rent equipment: Customers sometimes continued using equipment after the rental period because it had not yet been collected.
• Improper equipment use: Teams needed greater visibility to identify damaged or incorrectly used assets.
• Fragmented fleet information: Data spread across multiple applications made it difficult to monitor and manage assets centrally.

Enabling employees to recognize these conditions in real time and manage assets from a central location offered an opportunity to reduce costs, increase workforce efficiency, improve asset utilization, and increase equipment uptime for customers.

Sunbelt worked with KPMG to identify the right technology for its business requirements. Although the company initially explored prebuilt platforms from individual OEMs, it ultimately pursued an OEM-agnostic platform that it could own and operate. Together, the organizations selected ThingWorx as the Industrial Internet of Things platform for the initiative.

ThingWorx provided the flexibility required to connect a wide variety of legacy machines and systems. The company used the platform to aggregate its fleet’s telematics data in one place and make that information available through a centralized telematics portal and other integrated applications. ThingWorx ingested IoT data from disparate sources, standardized it, and gave drivers and operational teams real-time access to asset information.

The solution brought together hundreds of equipment brands and thousands of models with widely different configurations, helping the company create a more consistent experience for its workforce. The platform also provided a scalable cloud foundation that could accommodate additional connected assets and growing storage requirements.

The initial application rollout was completed in six months. Sunbelt began by connecting approximately 30,000 to 40,000 assets, but the value demonstrated by the platform led it to accelerate the retrofitting of additional equipment.

The centralized portal and normalized data enabled several fleet optimization use cases:

• Drivers could use a mobile logistics application to view an asset's latitude and longitude before arriving to retrieve it.
• Field teams gained real-time access to additional information, including fuel usage.
• Employees could locate remote assets more quickly and reduce time spent searching at job sites.
• Customers could access equipment location, utilization history, reports, and other information through a customer-facing application. 

By reducing the time drivers spent searching for equipment, Sunbelt increased asset availability and generated significant cost savings and efficiency gains. Faster equipment pickup also made more assets available to customers sooner, contributing to a better customer experience.

The solution delivered several key outcomes:

• Aggregated data from 16 systems into a unified view of asset location, health, and rental status
• Increased rental asset time by improving uptime and availability
• Reduced the time drivers spent locating equipment
• Improved fleet utilization and workforce efficiency
• Provided drivers and operational teams with real-time asset information
• Enabled customers to make data-informed decisions using location, utilization history, reports, and other equipment information

The customer-facing application extended the value of the company’s operational data beyond its internal teams. Customers could locate rental equipment quickly and remotely, review utilization information, and make more informed operational decisions without investing in building those capabilities themselves. In one example, a customer located lost light towers in a hurricane-affected area without requiring the industrial equipment manufacturer to dispatch personnel.

With a unified IoT platform in place, the organization also established a foundation for additional use cases, including more robust integration with service operations, expanded customer-facing applications, and remote diagnostics.