How can construction companies benefit from City Hire’s relentless focus on efficiency?

The construction sector in London is stressful enough for project and site managers and buyers, without unplanned downtime. That’s why it’s vital your suppliers can deliver the right equipment to the right place at the right time. You need people who will help you complete your project on schedule and within budget.

Here at City Hire we’ve been serving your sector for nearly 30 years and understand those challenges. One thing we’ve learnt is that being a reliable partner means relentlessly focusing on efficiency. Kaizen, the Japanese business philosophy, inspires us to strive for continuous improvement in everything we do.

However, it’s not good enough to simply claim we do this. We need to be able to show you how we do it and what it means for the service you receive. That is why, when we built our new website, we decided to make public our Key Performance Indicators – so you can check how we are doing in real time.

So, how can you improve construction efficiency with us?

Trust in transparency

We want you to see how we judge our own performance – and, more importantly, whether we are delivering on our service promises. One way we do this is through a measure we call Trip Efficiency, which we think is unique to City Hire. This calculates a score out of 100 based on the number of ‘perfect’ customer transactions, less any errors we make.

We aim to outlaw errors that waste your time, cost you money and potentially jeopardise the quality of your project. Our Trip Efficiency calculator deducts points for any incidence of wrong delivery address, incomplete or faulty equipment, late delivery or late collection. But we don’t stop there – we then follow up on every error that reduces our daily Trip Efficiency score.

Our operations team analyse the error data every day to identify not just what went wrong but why it went wrong. They then work out how to prevent it happening again – and share their findings with the entire company. For instance, we retest tools that have only been on hire for as little as half a day, maintaining the highest standard of quality and reliability.

Our operations team are incentivised by our trip efficiency results so the better the score on our collective Trip Efficiency performance, the greater the bonus for each individual which gives us all a stake in our shared success. This has resulted in many real behavioural improvements. For instance, our warehouse team now double-check every delivery van independently because two sets of eyes are better than one. It takes a bit more time but ensures we make our guaranteed delivery times anywhere in London.

KPIs keep us sharp

As well as our Trip Efficiency score, we also measure the time it takes to answer the phone – our target is 3-5 seconds (not minutes). We aim to respond to every email order within 15 minutes (not hours). Perhaps most importantly, at the request of numerous site managers, we aim to offsite every bit of equipment within 2-days (not weeks), so reducing loss, theft and damage as well as freeing up space on your site.

You can check our performance on all these KPIs and more on our website – at any time.

Listen to our customers

Don’t just take our word for it – hear what some of our satisfied customers have said in recent weeks.

“It’s good. Your transport guy is top notch. Overall a perfect service.”

“Good service and rapid deliveries. Cannot think of any issues.”

“We're really, really pleased, very much so. You deal with urgent requests, act promptly, do what you say. Absolutely no complaints.”

Better still; take control of your tool hire needs with our FREE, purpose built management system – see our launch blog for full details of this new integrated online service. Simply register your interest today. We will then get in touch to welcome you as a customer and help arrange your first order.