Telematics for Specialty Rental Equipment: How Connected Assets Can Help You More Efficiently Manage Your Fleet

Faith Kubicki

Specialty rental equipment – e.g., compressors, generators, and chillers – frequently generate solid gross margins and are important contributors to top line revenue. However, unlike heavy construction machinery, these assets are less likely to be outfitted with OEM telematics devices, and rental companies don’t always add aftermarket devices for remote monitoring. That said, including your specialty equipment in your Connected Assets program helps you identify machine exceptions early, before they become major issues. (The cost of a machine going hard down in the field is very high – and it negatively impacts your relationship with your customer, who is relying on your equipment as a mission-critical component of their jobsite.) This increased visibility also helps you more effectively meet your service level agreements (SLAs).

Here's an example:

The screenshot below shows a partial list of data points captured from a 1600CFM Diesel Compressor with a 535 HP engine (a Sullivan Palatek DF 1600PHCU3SBAF machine). The machine’s performance is monitored by an InTempo MX TP1 telematics hardware device, connected to the machine’s J1939 BUS.

By including your specialty equipment in your Connected Assets initiative, you can monitor these performance-related data points for exceptions to normal operating values. If a threshold is exceeded, you can notify the fleet manager, who can take immediate action. In some cases, you can even set up multi-condition alerts, which let you simultaneously monitor multiple anomalies that – when they occur on the same machine at the same time – tell a much broader story. Your service team can quickly analyze this information and determine/schedule the most appropriate work for the asset in question.

Whether you’re providing re-fueling services, utilization reporting, or just maintaining long term rental contracts, near real-time monitoring for your specialty rental equipment increases the value of your customer relationship.

Here’s what Brian Lindwall, Fleet Manager at HTE Services, has to say about their specialty equipment telematics efforts:

“Our service guarantees rely on the ability to monitor equipment remotely. Obtaining performance data helps us exceed our customer expectations”.

Discover Integrated Telematics for Your Specialty Rental Equipment

InTempo MX makes it simple to remotely monitor your specialty rental equipment as part of a Connected Assets initiative. With easy-to-install hardware and a portal that lets you track assets from all of your manufacturers in one place, you can get actionable insights to the right people at the right time. To learn more (or to request a free demo), contact us today.