How to win repeat business in the events industry using smarter location data

Any event supplier who manages vehicles, valuable assets, or on-site equipment can gain a significant competitive advantage. While the principles are the same, the specific benefits apply across the entire industry, including:

• Staging and AV Hire: Ensuring high-value lighting, sound desks, and screens arrive on schedule and are secure on-site.

• Marquee and Temporary Structure Companies: Tracking the arrival of large components and ensuring collection schedules are met efficiently.

• Catering and Mobile Bar Services: Monitoring catering vehicles to prove arrival and locations between multiple events in a single day.

• Fencing and Crowd Barrier Suppliers: Managing the logistics of thousands of individual assets across vast sites and ensuring none are left behind.

• Generator and Power Supply Hire: Knowing the exact location of units for maintenance or refuelling and receiving alerts if they are moved without authorisation.

• Portable Toilet and Facility Hire: As seen with Fortis Hire, mastering the complex delivery, servicing, and collection schedules is critical.

Ultimately, if your business relies on getting the right equipment to the right place at the right time, then smarter location data can help you reduce costs, improve service, and win more repeat business.

Tracking technology provides location data that cuts costs in several key areas. It allows you to give your customer a reliable ETA for arrival at the wedding venue, festival site or sporting venue. It also cuts down on labour costs by eliminating time wasted searching for assets, trailers and equipment, and prevents the loss, saving you on replacement costs.

Smarter location data lets you complete more jobs in less time. Knowing where all your assets are allows for faster turnarounds and better utilisation, meaning you can increase your capacity during peak season without needing a bigger fleet or more staff. On top of that, a reputation for being completely reliable allows you to command better rates and makes you the go-to supplier, which leads directly to more contracts.

Location data allows you to offer a level of professionalism and reliability that many competitors can't match. You can provide event managers with live tracking links for critical deliveries, offer precise ETAs instead of vague time windows, and instantly locate any piece of your equipment on their site. This transparency and efficiency proves you are a professional, low-risk partner, which is a powerful competitive advantage.

Because each asset has a different job. Vehicles need live, powered trackers like ABAX Fleet for location, driving behaviour and ETAs. Unpowered assets like trailers benefit from robust, long-battery-life trackers that report their location regularly. Smaller tools, which only need to be found within a site, are perfect for a proximity-based solution like the ABAX Locator, which uses Bluetooth. Using the right tool for the job ensures you get the most effective data without paying for features you don't need.

Tracking provides two key layers of security.

1. You can set up geofences around event sites or your depot. If an asset is moved outside of this designated area at an unauthorised time, you receive an alert.

2. If an asset is lost or stolen, the tracker's location data provides the police with the exact information they need to have a much higher chance of recovering your property quickly, saving you the cost and hassle of replacement.