In production
Equipment replacement, unit by unit
Regional vegetation management services company. Sage Intacct, telematics, maintenance records.
Situation
Repair spend was running hot and the board knew part of the fleet had to be replaced, but nobody could say which units. Repair dollars sat in the ledger without a reliable link to the machine, equipment numbers collided across two companies, and nobody knew what an hour of downtime cost.
What we built
A replacement desk scores every unit on cost, reliability and age against its class, from repair invoices, mileage, machine hours and downtime joined per unit. The fleet manager records keep, watch or replace with an audit trail, and the same data feeds a board capital plan. The first version was built live in the meeting where the CEO asked for it; the fleet manager has extended it herself since.
How it works
Units are keyed by company and equipment number; ambiguous matches are held out, never scored. One unit number turned out to be two machines.
Assumptions are shared data, not slide inputs: replacement cost, financing and downtime value are set once and feed both the desk and the plan.
Downtime was valued from the record, not asserted: $171 an hour across 1,999 matched incidents, against management guesses of $500 to $1,000.
Each version validates its snapshot, so the sponsor could tie the board numbers to the data to the dollar.
Impact
$5.62M
of repair spend across 824 equipment numbers tied back to units, 82% of dollars linked, where no cost-per-unit view existed.
51%
less unplanned downtime per tracked day on new units than on those slated for replacement, with repair spend 66% lower once normalized for use.
4 weeks
from the CEO's ask to a board-ready $2.145M replacement plan with two separately sized asks.
Board approval is not claimed. The tool also showed where the case was weak: on measured performance most units do not pay for themselves, so the plan rests on reliability and safety rather than payback.
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