New standard in construction machinery rentals and purchases

Together with HKL Baumaschinen, we have developed a brand new holistic online platform that focuses on the needs of customers and brings the efficiency of HKL's core business to ever greater heights. With this tech project, HKL is setting in motion a new platform approach – one that will spill over into all its business areas.

An e-commerce platform centered around users

Until now, transactions in construction equipment have been a very analog business: customers make inquiries by phone, e-mail or in person at HKL centers and rental stations, and each order is processed manually. Direct, personal contact is seen as crucial.

HKL, though, knows the potential it can tap by digitalising its business. Together, our task was in rethinking both the purchase and rental processes for the digital age and simplifying them for customers, as well as HKL’s own teams.

With Turbine Kreuzberg at our side, our goal of creating a holistic online platform that encompasses all HKL business areas will very soon become reality.

Arndt Rodewald

Managing Director

HKL Baumaschinen

B2B/B2C switch built right in

The platform we have developed for HKL is aimed equally at B2B and B2C customers. All customer groups benefit from an intuitive interface that allows for placing purchase and rental requests easily and getting feedback quickly. Not only can customers smoothly switch between purchasing, renting and service pages, they can also view inventory information, access product and accessory details, and calculate prices in real time.

To enhance the user experience, customers can create multiple shopping carts and lists, track their orders’ time and status, as well as get 24/7 support by using the integrated chat functionality.

For a premium after-sales experience, we made sure to include useful promotional features with offers and discounts including strike-through price functionality, showcasing how great of a deal customers are getting. Upon subscription, clients will now have access to an integrated HKL newsletter. Last but not least, users can now easily create an account as both consumers and businesses with a newly integrated direct registration feature.

On an HKL-internal level, employees can now receive reports with the platform’s entire history, which can easily be exported to Excel. As for customer creation, the previously manual process is now fully automated by the registration form which adapts to the business type.

100% platform-ready

With the new platform, we are establishing a lean, digital commerce process. Customers specify the desired products, location and/or rental period. If a customer makes a purchase off the platform, the item goes through a regular checkout process, directly creating the order.

As for the rental process, the system automatically generates a request that can be viewed and evaluated by HKL employees. The latter compile all necessary details and extend suitable offers for each respective inquiry, which customers can in turn accept or reject.

In the near future, we will extend the purchasing segment of the platform to support request/quote flows as well.

HKL dispatch staff also benefit considerably from the platform in their daily work. Gone are the days of analog requests and researching the best availability and details for each order individually.

The online platform bundles all important information and generates high-quality inquiries that can be processed more efficiently. As a result, dispatchers are growing into an increasingly advisory role.

OroCommerce at its best

To build the platform, we implemented Oro Commerce, which is by default meant to be a B2B ecommerce platform. Our first goal was to build the new online rental platform for HKL, which required precisely modelling a multitude of custom B2B business processes – something Oro particularly excels at.

Rental platforms are much more complex than ordinary online stores. They must be able to handle constantly changing dependencies between the number of products, rental periods, accessories, locations and prices – all in real time.

Rental requests are individual and variable; a platform needs to allow for unplanned, often weather- related changes in rental duration and construction progress. Add to this is a diverse product portfolio – the combination of products and matching accessories creates an enormous variety.

At the same time, we already thought about the next steps for HKL’s platform and created a technological basis for its future development. Using Oro, we extended the HKL digital environment by launching the “Baushop”, expanding the platform to include an online store in addition to the digital rental service.