The Spiderlift Company

Background

Steve Hadfield’s first experience with access platforms was in 1987 whilst working in the workshops of Crane & Platform Sales Ltd, who were a UK market leading supplier of refurbished mobile cranes and access platforms. Five years later Steve progressed into the commercial side of the access industry, having received a thorough grounding in the mechanical and engineering side of the business. Several sales roles with dealerships and manufacturers followed until Steve started his own business in 1999.

Today the Award Winning Distributor for Teupen Maschinenbau GmbH, the pioneer of the tracked Spiderlift from Germany, Steve Hadfield is proud to head up Ranger Equipment Ltd, incorporating The Spiderlift Company.

Steve says “Having been one of the original architects of the tracked Spiderlift market in the UK, we have worked hard to establish and develop the market place for these niche machines. Now this is reasonably established, we are proud to represent Teupen, who develop and manufacture a market leading product.”

In 2008 plans are underway for expansion and mild diversification. With the flagship division ‘The Spiderlift Company’ already created to continue the growing sales, rental and service of the specialist Teupen Spiderlift equipment.

The Issue

To track its equipment The Spiderlift Company was using a paper based system which was very labour intensive, there was a lot of paper floating round the office creating a big margin for error. As a result Spiderlift felt they couldn’t be as reactive as they should have been to customers’ requirements.

Spiderlift began to look initially for accounting software and also decided that if they were going to take the company forward then they would need a rental management solution that could run the rest of the business whilst integrating to Sage -their chosen accounts package.
 
Spiderlift began to search the market and asked inspHire to demonstrate its rental management solution.

“We were very impressed with inspHire’s impetus and level of commitment to obtain our business” Andy Bray, Commercial Director, The Spiderlift Company. 

The Solution

The Spiderlift Company selected inspHire Office Edition rental management solution.

The fundamental reasons for the decision were
• Live integration with Sage
• Reporting facility
• Windows ‘Look and Feel‘- important when attracting new employees, the majority of which are familiar with windows and Sage.

In February 2008 Spiderlift implemented inspHire, ACT and Sage. They purchased inspHire Workshop module in addition because they needed the facility to plan the workshop, to book spare parts out of stock and to record machine service history and maintenance records including records of LOLER certification.   Due to the nature of the business that Spiderlift operate in Health and Safety is a big issue so it is really important to for them to have all the Health and Safety documentation available on demand. 

inspHire has given Spiderlift an all round visibility of its business  that has enabled it to offer prompt answers to customers’ questions in order to win business. In addition information from inspHire is used to determine machine second hand values   
 offers is specialist and this coupled with their philosophy of providing good customer service

“inspHire has been fundamental in managing our workshop efficiently and accurately and the live integration with Sage to produce accurate invoicing has saved us an incredible amount of time. For us, it’s all about working more efficiently and on that score inspHire is 100%.” Andy Bray, Commercial Director, The Spiderlift Company.