About Mabey Hire

The Mabey Group of Companies is a major British organisation which specialises in bridging, steel fabrication, plant hire and construction products. The Group employs over one thousand people in around forty locations throughout the world. With an annual turnover of £100 million and over one hundred and fifty years experience in steel bridge building, the Group is one of the leading bridge suppliers in the world. inspHire now supply three of the Mabey Group of Companies - these are Mabey Hire, Mabey Support Systems and USA based Mabey Bridge and Shore Inc.

The Issue

Mabey had used a UNIX character based system for many years which had recorded full item level information about contracts but financial control of the hire fleet was not integrated. It had been maintained primarily through a spreadsheet that was updated once or twice per year.

Mabey had several more issues with the software:

Functionality was a big problem – although their old system managed contracts and customers, there were a number of areas that were not available and thus relied upon time consuming manual workarounds. For support they depended heavily on the availability of only one consultant who had knowledge of their old system. Mabey could only produce management information after the end of the month and felt that as the market was becoming more competitive their need for more detailed and up to date information was so much more critical.

The Solution

Mabey consulted with a number of asset management software suppliers, anticipating that the level of functionality of existing products on the market would only be able to match with 50% of their own requirements. They were also hoping that the chosen supplier would be interested in forming a partnership to develop their product according to the other 50% functionality required. 

• 32 bit true Windows system – to comply with Mabey Group policy

• Additional functionality including multi depot, secondary deliveries and TOS functionality, full stock control with complete supporting financial integrity, kit functionality and partial off hiring, as examples

• A reasonable level of support

• Future proofing of the technology in use

• Mabey Group as a whole to be considered

• Cost savings due to the lower level of support required

• A company which was financially sound with an established product and user base

• A team of consultants who they felt comfortable working with – who would understand their needs and be quick to respond to any issues which arose during the implementation and post live.

• A product which would integrate well with their Microsoft Great Plains accounting system

Mabey Hire went live January 2005, MSS implemented inspHire December 2005 and MBSI in March 2006.  These implementations demonstrated progressive improvements in the ease of implementation and diminishing volume of post live problems, quite an achievement in 14 months.

“inspHire came to our attention late on in our review of suppliers, but it was obvious from the first demonstration that inspHire ticked far more boxes than any other supplier. Fortunately, the initial fit was estimated at around 75% as regards to functionality, and 100% as regards the technology, support, cost and ‘future proofing’ requirements. After a couple of meetings during which we met with all the department heads at inspHire, it was clear that inspHire were very interested in our approach and welcomed the ‘partnership’ idea. Internally, after seeing a number of other suppliers’ products everyone was fully behind the inspHire option and there was no real competitor to this”

“Many of the issues related to the previous system are now no longer a problem, the essential functionality is in place and we are in the process of reviewing new change requests to further enrich the inspHire product for our use. We continue to enjoy a positive and open relationship with inspHire, and especially the direct contacts we have who are always open to our suggestions”.

“Because the inspHire product is designed to work on a Microsoft SQL database platform, we are making leaps and bounds in the provision of the right business intelligence to enable managers to be more effective.” - Simon Firmin, Chief Financial Officer, Mabey Hire.