From a manual business with 130 depots and a vast inventory of hire equipment, to an Uber-like digital marketplace that is set to deploy AI agents to resolve customer queries, all with a vast improvement in developer productivity.
That’s the journey taken by HSS ProService, formerly HSS Hire Group – established in 1947 – which last October sold its physical rental operations to a private equity firm and became a pure-play digital conduit between construction customers and suppliers.
We talk to CEO Tom Shorten about how the newly branded HSS ProService became the digital hub of an “Uber-ified” business that pairs construction managers with a network of suppliers to provide tools, equipment, fuel, training and building materials.
He tells us about the inspiration that led to the transformation – Brenda, the nerve centre of the digital marketplace – and his Tower One to Tower Two approach to migrating to the new systems.
What have you digitised and how would you describe the journey?
Historically, HSS was a truly analogue hire business, where someone would walk into a branch and ask for a piece of kit, and you’d write it on a piece of paper, a slip. We eventually started using green screen computer programmes to manage that. I mean, it’s still a green screen industry. They’re using F10, F9, F8 prompts on the keyboard to move through logic.
Our journey started to change because we started to understand that buyers don’t mind where the kit comes from as long as it turns up on time and it works. That gave us an opportunity to be just a broker of this kit – to give a fantastic experience and own the relationship with the customer and supplier, but not own the assets.
We had a business within the business called OneCall, where we did that, really successfully. That was really the acorn. It was fascinating to me that a customer would call one of our sales guys, he’d see we don’t own that piece of kit, call another supplier, and the customer would get what they wanted. We’d sit in the middle and make a turn on it. That acorn grew into the idea of “let’s digitise that”.
So, if a customer logged onto our platform and said, “I want one of these on this day”, and we have all the details we need, the system runs off to a supplier and says, “Hey, look, we’ve got this opportunity for you, hit here to accept”.
It comes back and we put the two together, and that’s effectively the nuts and bolts of a marketplace algorithm. So, we started to build out that journey.
When we started, about 5% of our orders were going through the .com site, so we digitalised orders. Now it’s anywhere between 40% and 45% purely via the web. The rest is via phone, email, chat.
Are the orders that come in via phone, email, etc, still digitised after that?
Imagine a Rubik’s Cube in the middle of our business, and that Rubik’s Cube has got a supplier interface, a colleague interface, a customer interface, an admin interface and a tech interface.
What happens is, however the order comes in, it always ends up in that.
The challenge has been to move at the speed the market will allow you to move at. There’s no point in trying to get ahead of the market because that’s not great for business Tom Shorten, HSS ProService
We call that Brenda. That’s the mothership of our business. In any office, there’s someone who knows everything, and it’s typically a lady, and she knows everything. So, we named our system Brenda. And however it comes in – from .com, from a phone call, WhatsApp, or whatever it is – it ends up in there.
The algorithm works to provide the best supplier for that customer, for that product, and we put it in the supplier portal for that supplier to look at it and accept the order.
We were an organisation where we owned a load of kit. We’ve pivoted all the way to owning no kit. We manage customer relationships and supplier relationships. The supplier delivers the kit, services the kit, and picks up the kit. We manage the customer relationship to ensure that all goes as smoothly as possible for our customer.
Could you sum up the challenges inherent in the process of moving from a real-world model to a fully digitised business?
The first thing is that the build of the technology has to be right, and that’s a really challenging thing to do for hire. There’s also a cultural challenge, because lots of our salespeople historically have gone out and sold on the basis that it was our kit and they were comfortable with our kit. What they have to do now is trust the fact that we will find the best kit for the customer, which isn’t our kit. And that is a different nuance for someone who’s been selling hire for a long time.
Also, for some of our customers who had always effectively gone to a branch to pick up a piece of kit, we spent a lot of time explaining to them how this new way of working would work for them and why it would be beneficial. The challenge has been to move at the speed the market will allow you to move at. There’s no point in trying to get ahead of the market because that’s not great for business.
What were the challenges on the technical side of the transition? What did the crossover period between the two models look like?
I didn’t try for a “crossover”. We did it like this. Imagine Tower One was our old business. I didn’t try to grow the new business in Tower One. I created Tower Two, and with a different tech team built Tower Two. And then I moved people into Tower Two. I didn’t create a drawbridge.
I knew from previous experience that if you try to take a legacy organisation and grow a new change, you’ll spend years convincing people and you’ll have the wrong skillset.
So, [CTO] Daniele [Turi]’s team was totally separate to the legacy IT team. We built new foundations and we grew anew all the way up, including brand, culture, look and feel – everything.
We’re in the AI era with automation and agents, so what’s next?
We’re developing agents now to do what we call highly repetitive tasks in an environment. For example, if a customer wants a proof of delivery, at the moment one of our team might have to call up the supplier, hunt down a proof of delivery, can’t get hold of the right person, etc. All that now is going to be done through AI on an associated timeline.
For every single contract, we’ll be able to visualise the status and the AI agents will work to update the data required to satisfy the customer need. We’re building those AI agents ourselves.
We’re really lucky with our team. They’ve upskilled themselves to use Cloud Code really, really well, and now we don’t write any code at all in our business. We think we’ve probably got 10 times the output from our IT team. We’re running at two-week sprints into delivery. Software engineering has changed forever in our business.
Looking back at the platform’s scaling journey, what is one major architectural or strategic decision you would approach differently today?
The one I would mention is an architectural debate about what platform to use and how we make management information available for reporting.
We ended up with a system called Metabase, which is a really good dashboard and analytics platform. You can go as deep as you want to go, down to the nth crumb, as it were. We had been using other systems, and when our new head of data science came in, they suggested we park Metabase over the top of the data lake and shut down all the other things.
We didn’t do that at first, because we were scared. But the implementation of Meta as a management tool was foundational to enabling the flow of data that our teams can understand. Prior to that, we had a lot of data, but not a lot of it was understood. So Meta brought data literacy into our business.
