Express benefits from streamlined hire fleet
4 October 2022
I recently wrote about how Express Hire (Dorset) Ltd of Poole was finding it difficult to recruit new team members in the current extraordinarily competitive jobs market, a problem that has been flagged up by organisations in many sectors of industry.
As manager Andy George told me then, he found it frustrating that job seekers seemed to prioritise having as short a working day as possible over a long-term career.
The situation remains challenging, but Andy has used the situation to advantage by reviewing the company’s fleet profile, since workshop fitters are among the positions to be filled at a time when the business is adding more equipment.
“We realised that some items were taking too much time to repair or service when our workshop technicians could be dealing with more bread-and-butter equipment,” he told me recently.
“For example, we ran some compact tracked dumpers but the reliability of this particular manufacturer’s machine was becoming a problem. They have been in the fleet for some time and have given us our return on investment, so we decided to dispose of them, and we might replace them with another maker’s machines that are more reliable.
“Similarly we’ve looked at some of our landscaping equipment. We have had a towable wood chipper on the fleet for some years but some customers just don’t look after it. They’ll put barbed wire through it and jam the mechanism, and it ends up costing a lot of time and labour replacing and sharpening the blades.
“So we are going to concentrate on more of the bread-and-butter machinery that is more straightforward to maintain like our diggers, dumpers and telehandlers, with higher utilisation. We have around 450 items of plant in the fleet now and it a lot if it has to be turned round quickly to meet demand.”
So although the recruitment situation remains challenging, some positives have come out of it for Express Hire. And the company continues to invest in its fleet – more on that in a future post.
