Background
United Rentals is the world’s largest equipment rental company — a $15B+ annual revenue business serving construction, industrial, commercial, and government customers across more than 1,400 locations in North America and Europe. Beyond equipment rental, United Rentals provides integrated site services including power generation, fluid management, safety services, and — increasingly — connected site monitoring.
The connected site monitoring capability grew through acquisition and partnership rather than through a unified platform strategy. Over several years, United Rentals assembled monitoring capabilities by integrating with multiple specialized vendors: one for equipment telematics, another for fuel management, a third for air quality monitoring, a fourth for noise compliance, and additional tools for access control and worker safety.
Each tool solved a specific monitoring problem. Together, they created a fragmentation problem: construction site managers interfacing with multiple platforms to understand the complete state of their site, and United Rentals’ operations teams supporting multiple vendor relationships, multiple API integrations, and multiple data formats.
The strategic question United Rentals faced was familiar to any operations technology manager: continue integrating point solutions, or consolidate to a platform that handles multiple monitoring categories in one system?
The Challenge: Site Intelligence in Pieces
What Fragmentation Looked Like in Practice
A construction site manager using United Rentals’ monitoring services would log into one platform to check equipment telematics, a different platform to check fuel levels, a third for air quality, and yet another for noise compliance.
Each platform had its own data model, its own alert configuration, and its own reporting format. Answering the question “what is the current operational state of my site?” required synthesizing information from four or five separate sources — a task that required a skilled operator and produced a lagged, manually assembled picture.
For United Rentals’ customer service teams, supporting these multiple tools required familiarity with multiple platforms, multiple vendor support relationships, and the ability to diagnose problems that might originate in any of the integrated systems.
The Integration Tax
Each point solution that integrated with other tools in the stack created an integration that required maintenance. When a vendor updated their API, the integration broke until updated. When data formats changed on one side, downstream consumers needed to be updated.
The integration maintenance burden — keeping all these connections working as individual vendors updated their products — was a constant overhead that consumed IT and operations resources.
Scale Visibility
With customer site monitoring data in multiple systems, understanding the aggregate across all customer sites required data extraction from each system, manual reconciliation, and significant time. A daily report on active site monitoring status was a labor-intensive compilation, not an automated view.
The Solution: VX-Olympus as the Unified Site Monitoring Platform
Platform Consolidation Strategy
United Rentals worked with Viaanix to define the monitoring categories that VX-Olympus would need to handle to replace the fragmented point solution stack. The categories:
- Equipment telematics: GPS location, engine hours, fuel consumption for rental equipment on customer sites
- Generator and power equipment fuel management: Tank level monitoring with delivery scheduling
- Air quality monitoring: Particulate matter (PM2.5, PM10), CO, and NOx at sites with excavation and emission restrictions
- Noise monitoring: dBA levels at site boundaries for permit compliance documentation
- Access control: Personnel check-in/check-out at site access points
- Environmental conditions: Temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure at weather-sensitive operations
VX-Olympus’s multi-protocol capability (BLE, LoRaWAN, cellular MQTT, HTTP) handled the diverse sensor types across all categories. The unified data model stored all monitoring data in a single time-series store, enabling cross-category dashboards and rule chains that the previous fragmented stack could not support.
Multi-Tenant Architecture for Customer Isolation
Each construction customer’s site data needed to be isolated from other customers’ data — United Rentals could see all sites, but individual customers could see only their own sites. VX-Olympus’s multi-tenant hierarchy mapped directly to this requirement:
- United Rentals: platform operator level with cross-tenant visibility
- Each construction customer: tenant level with visibility to their own sites
- Individual job sites: sub-tenant level within each customer’s tenant
Customer-facing access was provided through a VX-Olympus-based portal with United Rentals branding — customers saw “United Rentals Connected Site” rather than the underlying VX-Olympus platform.
Single Dashboard for Site State
The consolidated site dashboard that site managers access shows all monitoring categories in one view:
- Equipment location map with GPS positions of all United Rentals assets on site
- Generator fuel levels with days-to-empty calculations
- Current air quality readings with permit threshold comparison
- Noise level readings with running 1-hour and 8-hour averages
- Personnel on-site count from access control check-ins
A site manager can confirm site operational status in under 2 minutes from a single screen. Previously, this required checking 4–5 separate platforms.
The Deployment: Phased Rollout Across Site Types
Phase 1: High-Value Site Pilot
Initial deployment was limited to large construction sites (>50 pieces of United Rentals equipment) where the monitoring value was highest and the customer relationship was most established. This pilot group — approximately 25 sites — validated the platform configuration, tested the customer portal, and refined the alert routing for each monitoring category.
Key findings from the pilot:
- Equipment telematics integration required connector development for older CAN bus equipment that didn’t natively support the standard telematics protocol; this was resolved in the first 4 weeks
- Air quality alert thresholds required calibration against local permit standards, which varied by jurisdiction; configurable thresholds per site handled this
- Customer portal adoption was faster than expected — site managers preferred the single-platform view over the multi-tool workflow they had been using
Phase 2: Standard Equipment Integration
With the platform validated, United Rentals standardized the monitoring hardware included with specific rental product categories:
- Generators above 100kW: fuel level monitoring included, delivered with the generator
- Mobile air compressors with high-flow applications: air quality sensor included for applicable site types
- Equipment packages for sites with air quality permits: monitoring package as a site service add-on
Standardization reduced deployment time — the equipment arrived with sensors already installed, and the VX-Olympus device profile for each sensor type was pre-configured.
The Results
Support Efficiency
United Rentals’ customer support team handles questions from construction site managers about monitoring data. With the consolidated platform, support inquiries routing to multiple vendor contacts dropped — all monitoring data was in one system that the support team could access and explain.
The average handling time for monitoring-related support calls dropped by approximately 40% — the support rep could view the same data the site manager was seeing without switching between platforms.
Customer Experience
Site managers rated the consolidated portal significantly higher than the previous multi-platform experience in customer satisfaction surveys. The specific improvement cited consistently: “I can see the status of my site in one place.” The qualitative feedback aligned with the quantitative metric: time to establish site situational awareness dropped from multiple minutes across multiple platforms to under 2 minutes on a single dashboard.
Platform Maintenance Reduction
The integration maintenance overhead was eliminated for the monitoring categories that migrated to VX-Olympus. The operations technology team redirected the engineering effort that had been consumed by integration maintenance toward new platform capabilities.
Conclusion
United Rentals’ VX-Olympus deployment illustrates the platform consolidation value proposition in a large-scale commercial context. The specific benefits — support efficiency, customer experience, and higher service adoption — were predictable from the point solution trap framework: fragmented tools create overhead that a unified platform eliminates.
For equipment rental companies, managed service providers, and any organization delivering monitoring services to customers, the consolidation from multiple specialized tools to a common platform is a structural improvement that compresses cost, improves customer experience, and enables monitoring categories to be combined in ways that individual tools cannot support independently.
Talk to our team about building a connected site monitoring ecosystem with VX-Olympus.