The Equipment Company uses ToolSense to make asset operations more transparent, faster to document, and easier to manage. This customer story focuses on the operational change: cleaner asset data, quicker issue handling, and maintenance workflows that teams can follow in daily work.
The Equipment Company is a Johannesburg-headquartered importer and distributor covering southern Africa, bringing European cleaning equipment into the South African market for nearly a decade. Kyle De Rose runs the business as Director.
Paperwork into Excel into…?
Pre-ToolSense, asset management ran on paper. Slips were collected, transcribed into Excel, then sifted through workbooks every time the team needed a history. It was a workable system at small scale and a millstone at any scale beyond that. After meeting the ToolSense team on the show floor in Amsterdam, “we had been looking for something along those lines”, the search ended.
Why a distributor wants its own platform
OEMs offer their own IoT modules on new machines, but for a distributor that imports from Europe to South Africa there’s a 4-to-8-week gap from order to arrival. And not every customer wants tracking pre-installed. The Equipment Company keeps a baseline platform that works across every brand it sells, with retrofittable hardware that can be installed locally after the sale, bringing a consistent customer experience regardless of which manufacturer the machine came from.
Manufacturer IoT only covers their own machines. We needed a platform that works across every brand we distribute, and can be retrofitted in South Africa, not bolted on in the factory.
Kyle De Rose · Director, The Equipment Company
