PRODUCT NEWS
NRG Riverside move up a gear
Municipal hire has proven challenging over the past ten years and managing equipment from cradle to grave takes a huge amount of skill and expertise.
Buying the correct equipment to the right specification at the best price, ensuring high-level uptime and then disposing of the asset or reselling it can prove difficult enough; but rental companies must also make money to stay in business. With rates still very competitive in the market it’s no surprise that some of the most historic names in municipal hire are no longer around. NRG Riverside on the other hand have not only survived but flourished in the rental environment, becoming, one of the largest rental providers to the municipal market.
NRG Riverside rentals are continuing to expand, offering a wider range of municipal equipment and choosing Bucher Municipal products to lead the expansion. With MaxPowa V65 truck-mounted sweepers and the new Bucher GullyFlex medium-volume tankers in stock, NRG will offer market- leading products on short lead times. They are also providing Bucher Municipal compact sweepers, spreaders and snow ploughs on short-term, seasonal, and long- term hire.
Is renting equipment more beneficial to today’s municipal operators? Russell Markstein, Chief Commercial Officer for NRG Riverside, offers his observations of renting in comparison to owning for all would-be sweeper, tanker and spreader operators:
Fleet availability
Many fleet departments consider sweepers and gully tankers as less important than
66 | October 2023 |
www.draintraderltd.com GullyFlex C802
RCVs and passenger transport and sometimes rightfully so, councils would face more complaints for not collecting a row of bins or for leaving passengers stranded than a road not being swept that week. With a finite number of engineer hours available, in times when the workshops are faced with multiple VORs, sweepers and gully units may not get repaired for days or even weeks. With rental equipment, a response can be within 4 hours and, as all the engineers are experts in municipal vehicles, first-time fix rates are over 85%. If the sweeper can’t be fixed within a reasonable time a replacement machine will be provided.
At NRG Riverside, we operate a call centre and track all our vehicles to provide the highest levels of support and information to our customers. A set of key performance
indicators can be provided to show the rental performance.
Whole lifetime cost
Rental rates are competitive, even with recent increases in the finance rates rental companies have managed to keep rates at low levels. This is because finance is only a part of the total costs of the rental. With the buying power of NRG Riverside, the equipment is often priced lower than the council could buy it for and therefore the funding might be less even with a higher finance rate. Rentals allow for a residual equipment value which is usually much more than the auction value at the end of the equipment life, again reducing the cost of ownership. Maintenance costs are also fixed with a rental, even if a major component fails from fair wear and tear, the
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