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Spring 2022 19 INDUSTRY NEWS www.hae.org.uk www.eha.org.uk Portable accommodation and welfare unit hirer, Carter Accommodation, has taken on several different areas of the MCS rental management system throughout the business which it claims has led to improved customer service, better visibility of hire equipment, and the ability to work on the move with the power of mobile apps and web solutions. It has moved away from spreadsheets and manual processes and brought all its business operations under one umbrella with a centralised data management system. It also now uses MCS Resource Planner and Transport Mobile app. Carter’s IT Manager Gary Shipp said: “MCS Transport Mobile has given us much better visibility of our workers in the field and has made the entire process seamless. We can now send out deliveries, collections, and services needed that day to our drivers using the Transport Mobile app. “Waste transfer notes are also instantly available to view in real-time in MCS-rm, along with any damage photos, and there is clear visibility of what jobs have been completed. It also means that we always get the required documentation back from my drivers, which can automatically trigger a job in the workshop for returned equipment.” Carter Accommodation has also adopted mobile in the workshop to make the maintenance process more efficient and increase equipment uptime. Gary said: “Since introducing Workshop Mobile into the business, we have been able to eliminate paper. We save hours each day, as previously, all paperwork had to be scanned into our computers, which is now unnecessary. We have also seen substantial timesaving because the staff no longer need to come into the office to pick up any paperwork as they can access it all in MCS-rm. When a job has been finished, we love that we can see this instantly thanks to tickets being updated digitally.” Equipment rental software specialist MCS is offering customers a simple way to protect their businesses from cyber threats. Its MCS Cloud solution provides a secure Crowdstrike firewall to protect business from malicious attacks where intruders could steal, change, or destroy a company’s important business data or information. MCS Technical Director, Brian Francis, said: “Working in technology, we see many instances where without the proper firewalls in place, disaster can strike, and businesses can struggle to get back up and running again.” Precautions taken by the rental software supplier include an offsite database replication in a second location and daily backup processes. Looking after business data means also ensuring that if something happens to the building or a threat puts one of the data centres at risk, all data will still be safe and accessible. “We often consider our offsite data back-ups as more of a cyber than a physical threat, but more frequently now, physical cyber-attacks are possible because of the more modern and technical nature of building security. Ensuring that data is not vulnerable in its physical location is key to having failsafe cyber-secure measures,” Brian said. As well as firewalls and data back-ups, ensuring that a business’ operating system is always up to date is vital”, he added. For example, Windows often releases updates that keep up with new technologies and new versions that fix vulnerabilities. The benefit of using a Cloud solution is that these updates are rolled out without the end-user doing anything”, he said. HIRE COMPANIES GIVEN EXTRA LAYER OF CYBER SECURITY CARTER ACCOMMODATION IMPROVES PRODUCTIVITY AND VISIBILITY OF HIRE EQUIPMENT