When we're just talking about facilities and how important it is to the process that supports rent-to-rent, I'd like to take a little more in-depth look at a yard layout. And I want you to look and see how something like this might work for your dealership where you've got a customer parking in the front, you've got an access lane that comes down through the equipment, or it could be to the outside. But there's a real clear path about how to get equipment back to the back where we would have an unloading zone. And back there we may have a ramp that'll allow flatbed trucks to back up to it. And we'd like that to be pretty close to where we would have the fuel tanks and also the wash rack and maybe where we do our initial inspection. Those types of things need to be clustered together, if at all possible. Because if they're not, then what has to happen is someone has to unload the piece of equipment, the customer drops it, one of your employees is going to have to go get in it, drive it over to the fuel tank, and then he's going to have to drive it to wherever the inspection area is, then drive it over to where the wash rack area is, and then if it needs any repair, drive it back to the shop. So the closer you can put those things together, it means less steps, less travel time, and less employee labor that you have to spend to move things around. So you can look at this chart a little bit more in depth and see that there is place for the rental fleet specifically, there's place for new inventory, and they're not to be confused. I mean, they need to be separated so that you can clearly see what's available for rent, you can see what's available for new, and at least a tagging system or something that separates those things. Then I want you to see as the equipment moves out of this inspection area and now a technician needs to touch it, I think it's really important for you to see that most rental equipment is having preventive maintenance done to it. So it would be much like a jiffy lube or a quick lube type of place, that the machine has been inspected, no damages to it, and it gets washed, and then it goes through a service lane. So that's a fast lane to coming out the other side. So the things that we might do in that specific area might be lubrication, we've got access to all the greases and oils that we might need, we've got an air compressor so we can blow out filters and those types of things. And so the skill level that it takes to run a service lane is very different than a repair lane where maybe at this point we've got to do a lot more diagnostics, we may be taking the equipment down and disabling it for a few days, and you don't want those two activities to be in the same service lane. So think about the way that your shop is laid out. Maybe it could be reconfigured to where you could speed up the process of how equipment gets from one side, coming back, and how it gets returned to the rental ready area, because this is a big challenge for most dealers.

facility layout

optimal yard layout

rental fleet

equipment rental process

dealers