Yardz adds functionality to equipment management tool

US tech company Yardz, which provides a digital platform for contractors to manage rented and owned construction equipment, is expanding its platform to include workforce management.

The employee functionality, which is currently being trialed by a utility contractor, will allow staff to use the Yardz app to log in and log out, with data automatically linked to the contractor’s back office, payroll and financing systems.

Yardz’s chief product officer Joshua Schuyler – who co-founded the company in 2018 with CEO Jason Perez – told KHL Group that the system would allow employees to submit time sheets for payroll purposes; “we integrate with wherever your employees are. If you’re in the Microsoft-based environment, the employee comes into our system.

“Now your employee can track their time inside our application. And then it goes to the approvals that it needs to go through, and then to your accounting department…And it includes all the extra things that come up over time – like hazard pay and storm pay - because we work with a lot of utility companies.”

Joshua Schuyler, chief product officer of US-based Yardz. (Image: KHL Group)

Schuyler, speaking at the ConExpo-Con/Agg show, said the new features have completed ‘proof of concept’ with a customer and will be rolled out company-wide in July, before a wider market launch.

The initial concept

Yardz, based in Alpharetta, north of Atlanta, Georgia, started out offering a tool for contractors to manage their rented-in equipment – giving them a single platform to manage multiple rental suppliers – but following requests from customers the platform was extended to add contractor-owned equipment.

The way the platform has evolved means that typically 70% of the equipment is now contractor-owned and 30% rented. Schuyler said one customer alone had 200,000 assets on the system.

In terms of the core equipment functionality, contractor customers can send their rented equipment data directly to Yardz, but the tech company also has agreements with multiple rental providers to integrate customer data into the platform.

“The data comes into our platform, it’s automated - no copy and paste – usually on the same day or within 24 hours of a rental contract being executed”, said Schuyler.

He said it had agreements with around 60 rental companies; “We’re adding new ones all the time. It’s easy to build an integration. There’s a lot of different ways it can happen. But even if a company doesn’t want to integrate…they’re small, or don’t have a tech arm to make that happen - then we have the ability to request new rentals from our software.”

90% of rental market covered

He said the platform could integrate with more than 90% of the North American rental market; “There’s not been a single customer where we haven’t been able to integrate with over 90% of the third-party rentals. And the other 10%, they’re either manually entering in when it’s a one off or they’re using our tool to request it.

“Customers can add their rentals in or they can upload a file, with lots of different ways for their data to come in. We’re really secure in terms of what we do with that data. We don’t share rental information, we don’t share rental rates with other customers. We don’t anonymize that information and use that to help our customers. We’re a reporting tool to help you make better decisions about your rentals for your company.”

He said customers were able to save significant costs by using the platform; “[By highlighting] equipment they’re not using, maybe overpaying for something based on a negotiated rate and not paying attention to it. And then 70 to 80% time savings from managing rentals.”

The company charges by user licences rather than on the number of assets, with a minimum size of around 5 licences.

“We have a lot of customers with just the five users on there that have a thousand employees, but they’re using two to three parts of our application to save money and make the job easier”, he said.

Not a rental marketplace

Schuyler made the point that the system is not designed to find the best rental prices – it is not a rental marketplace – but it can be used to off-rent equipment. It can also call up rentals, but most customers don’t use it for that.

“When the rentals are coming in, they’re tied to your reps. We don’t change relationships. We don’t try to change your pricing. You can still order on the phone to keep that relationship with your rental supplier. The data’s just going to come in here and make it easier to manage.”

Off-renting is a popular tool, however; “Lots of people are doing that. Because when you hit the off button from our system, notifications go to your rep at that rental company, they also get sent to yourself and all your project team members. It gives full visibility – ‘Hey, I’m off renting this’ - because somebody you might go, ‘Wait, I need that tomorrow. Cancel that request.’”

Telematics data integrated

The company is also now integrating telematics data to its platform, either data supplied from third-party systems or using hardware supplied by Yardz.

“We have some customers that by our units because we have hardware that we resell and they’ll put them on their rented equipment because there’s only a 50% chance that your rental will come with a working piece of telematics on it.

“They’d rather just put our unit in there while it’s on rent, and then they have a process when they off rent.”

The two co-founders are the majority owners of the business and Schuyler said they don’t need additional funding; “If we consider taking any sort of financial support, it would be a strategic type of partnership to scale quicker, but it’s not needed.

He said the business has been profitable for three years and grew its revenues by 65% last year, “and we’re on track for 100% growth this year.

“We have a lot of good customers that trust us with billions of dollars worth of equipment and rentals through our system.”