For nearly 60 years, Herc Rentals has equipped North America’s contractors, institutions, suppliers, and communities with the gear that gets work done. Work that delivers progress, opportunity, and better days ahead.
And wherever there’s opportunity to build a brighter future, Herc Rentals is there.
That commitment is more important now than ever as Herc Rentals’ customers are facing a runway of growing demand. Stimulus funding, electrification, facility upgrades, manufacturing re-shoring, and infrastructure investments are driving expansion and modernization like never before.
To meet this demand, Herc recognized its customers across society’s most essential industries needed smarter control of the equipment driving their work. So, together with Deloitte Digital, Herc Rentals embarked on a journey to deliver a digital solution that would enable its customers to rent, track, and control the productivity of their equipment digitally—from any device, anywhere.
Ambition
Manage heavy equipment fleets from any device, anywhere
Inspired by a purpose to equip customers and communities to build a brighter future, Herc Rentals has long been committed to innovating and providing premium equipment and best-in-class services. As a leader in equipment rental, Herc has supplied gear and solutions that have supported construction, manufacturing, and industrial progress in North America. For nearly 60 years, customers have put Herc Rentals equipment to work to erect and maintain buildings, restore communities following natural disasters, and build transportation networks—among many other projects foundational to our economies and essential to our daily lives.
Herc Rentals’ reputation for offering easy and efficient solutions has become more important in recent years as its customers have experienced supply chain disruptions, labor shortages and extreme climate conditions—all while facing growing demand from mega projects and large infrastructure jobs, and increased investments in traditional construction and maintenance work across every market in North America.
These complex industry dynamics began to change the way Herc’s customers approached their operations and engaged partners in their value chain. As new data-driven capabilities emerged, Herc Rentals recognized an opportunity to deliver more value to its customers through access to fleet management and logistics technology that would optimize the productivity of their work.
Herc Rentals engaged Deloitte Digital with a vision of creating a customer-facing technology that would transform the future of equipment rental.
Action
Engineer new customer connections
Herc Rentals and Deloitte Digital assembled a team of technology, sales, and operations experts with a guiding mission: design a digitally-enabled solution that would make renting and managing equipment as intuitive as ordering a ride to the airport.
“Project Elevate” began in early 2021 and would become an 18-month journey to elevate the equipment rental experience for the future. Leveraging customer feedback and insights and analyzing the world’s best-in-class digital experiences, the team reimagined the equipment rental experience—bringing into a single platform data and capabilities powered by leading-edge technologies including AWS, Adobe, Salesforce, and Magento.
In the summer of 2022, Herc Rentals set a new standard for the equipment rental experience with the introduction of its ProControl NextGen™ digital platform.
ProControl NextGen™ empowers Herc Rentals’ customers to capitalize on their own strengths while easily and efficiently drawing from Herc’s fleet management expertise—through rich data made available in an easy-to-use, mobile-enabled format across the equipment rental cycle.
This innovative, customer-facing platform includes telematics and fleet management solutions, along with a feature-rich and user-friendly e-commerce experience. From reserving equipment, to tracking delivery and pick-up of gear, to monitoring equipment performance, to managing who operates equipment, to having full visibility to invoices and upcoming rental end-dates, these ProControl NextGen™ capabilities and more put Herc Rentals’ customers in full control of their key equipment rental events and actions.
Achievement
Rapid growth in digital accounts and service calls
Since go-live, ProControl NextGen™ has generated a quarterly growth in new digital accounts of more than 25%.
The feature-rich fleet management tools embedded in the platform have also been heavily adopted. In the year after launching ProControl NextGen™, telematics alerts, which provide real-time GPS and equipment diagnostics data to facilitate better fleet management and productivity, grew by over 150% compared to the same time period post go-live.
Use of the digital service call feature, which allows customers to log and manage a service call directly through the customer-facing app, is up by 100% compared to the same time period in the first year post go-live.
Overall user adoption continues on a rapid upward trajectory.
And, because ProControl NextGen™ integrates technology that improves the ability to gather, evaluate and make data-driven decisions, this end-to-end digital transformation sets the stage for continuous improvements to the customer experience and Herc Rentals’ own operational excellence.
Driven by its purpose of helping customers and communities build a brighter future, Herc Rentals set out to transform the future of equipment rental. It’s here: ProControl NextGen™.
quarterly growth in new digital accounts
growth in telematics alerts
increase in the use of digital service calls
Read more about Herc Rentals' digital transformation in the WIRED article here.