The new city centre premises cover 20,000 square feet, with a large yard and improved customer facilities, such as a purpose-built shop with a range of accessories for sale, an area where customers’ equipment can be repaired or PAT tested, plenty of parking, a covered drive-in bay and even free coffee.
Alide has now celebrated thirty successful years of steady growth, and has expanded and improved its business operation in many ways in recent years. It created a new event and toilet hire arm four years ago to complement its tool and small plant business and has recently invested in a new MCS-rm rental software solution to support and grow its successful hire business.
Managing Director Gareth Hayward reports: “We needed a powerful software solution to help us manage the administration of our plant and tool hires, as well as manage our expanding toilet hire fleet and coordinate the toilet servicing schedules. We choose MCS-rm from software specialists MCS and have been very pleased with the decision.”
Gareth continues: “Operationally, we’ve seen a huge improvement. MCS-rm saves us a great deal of time and effort on all the work around contracts, invoices and all other routine, time-consuming tasks that are a necessity in running any hire business.”
Gareth explains some of the benefits that the new hire management system has yielded: “The advanced Transport Manager functionality has been immensely useful. We can see the location of all the toilets that are due for servicing on a particular day and the system plans out the best route. It all works extremely well and eliminates the time previously spent in manually plotting out the service round.”
MCS-rm has also transformed Alide’s storage of hire information, which is now entirely paperless. Documents such as proposals, delivery tickets, collection notes, waste transfer notes and servicing tickets are printed with a barcode on, scanned in and electronically attached to the contract, giving an instantly accessible audit trail.
Gareth says: “It takes only a couple of minutes to put our hands on information to resolve customer queries, whereas in the past it took quarter of an hour or more to find, photocopy and fax the information out to the customer. It’s win-win: we save resources while providing the prompt response that our customers value.”
Gareth concludes: “Now with the new depot up and running and the new software solution embedded in the business, we are able to keep the bar high in delivering exceptional service and keep customer satisfaction at the top of our priority list”.
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