PLANT HIRE · EDINBURGH
IN SHORT
Edinburgh-based team building hire desk and fleet automation for plant, tool and access hire businesses across the city, the Lothians and Fife.
Edinburgh plant hire: what the admin actually looks like
Edinburgh hire demand is driven by constrained city-centre sites, fit-out and refurbishment work, and a steady residential and infrastructure programme across the Lothians. Short hires, tight delivery windows and difficult access mean the desk handles more transactions per pound of revenue than a rural depot — which makes response speed and off-hire discipline the two things worth automating first.
Why work with us locally
- Edinburgh-headquartered — on your depot for discovery and go-live.
- Built for high-transaction, short-duration city hire patterns.
- Experience integrating hire, transport and accounting systems already in place.
Systems we build for Edinburgh plant hire businesses
Hire desk enquiry triage
An agent takes enquiries from phone, email and web, checks live fleet availability, quotes from your rate matrix and books or holds the machine — with the desk approving anything unusual.
Off-hire capture and collection
Every off-hire logged with a timestamp and a written confirmation to the customer, then routed straight into the transport plan — removing both the revenue leak and the argument.
Inspections and compliance
Every asset carries its certification and service dates. The system schedules the work before expiry and stops an out-of-cert machine being booked out.
Damage and recharge capture
Condition captured on the way out and on the way back, differences flagged automatically, and a recharge drafted with photographic evidence for a person to approve.
Questions we get asked
- Do you work with plant hire businesses in Edinburgh in person?
- Yes. We are Edinburgh-headquartered, so Edinburgh is a short trip. Discovery and process mapping usually happen on site or on your yard, and the build runs remotely with weekly demos.
- How long before a Edinburgh plant hire business sees anything working?
- The £499 AI Ops Audit takes five working days and returns a costed plan. A first production workflow is typically live within four to six weeks of starting the build.
- What does it cost?
- £499 for the audit, then usually £6,000–£25,000 for a first production workflow depending on how many systems it touches, plus a monthly running cost for hosting, model usage and support.
TRUST & CREDENTIALS
How we work, and what stands behind it
This page is maintained by Forth Systems. Everything listed below describes our own team, hosting choices and the technologies we build on — it is a statement of practice, not an independent certification or an endorsement by the vendors named.
UK team & data residency
Who builds it, and where your data sits while they do.
UK-based engineers
Edinburgh-headquartered. Every system is designed, built and supported by our own UK-based engineering team — no offshore delivery pool.
UK / EU hosting by default
Applications and databases are provisioned in UK or EU regions unless you require otherwise, with encryption in transit and at rest.
Human-in-the-loop by design
Every AI system we ship keeps a manual override. Nothing irreversible happens without an operator able to review, edit or stop it.
Audit trails as standard
Automated actions are written as first-class records — who or what did it, when, against which input — so operations stay evidence-ready.
Systems we build on
The platforms our systems run on. These are the technologies we deploy and support — not sponsorships or reseller badges.
OpenAI, Anthropic & Google models
Model-agnostic delivery. We route each workload to the model that fits it on cost, latency and accuracy, and can switch without a rebuild.
Supabase & Postgres
Row-level-security Postgres as the operational spine under every platform we run.
Stripe payments
Payment capture, checkout and reconciliation wired directly into job and permit workflows.
Xero, Sage & HubSpot integrations
Production integrations into the finance and CRM systems UK operators already run, so automation lands where the business keeps its records.
Streetworks & industry credentials
Operational domains we build in daily, with the sector systems we integrate against.
DfT Street Manager integration
Our Kerbco permit chain creates and tracks streetworks permit applications against DfT Street Manager and local highway authority processes.
NRSWA-aligned workflows
Permit, reinstatement and traffic-management workflows built to the New Roads and Street Works Act process contractors are inspected against.
Traffic management planning
Roadplan produces signing and guarding layouts for council submission and for the crew installing them on site.
Operator-built, not consultancy-built
We run streetworks and plant operations ourselves. Every platform started as a system we needed in our own business.
Insurance certificates, registration numbers and security documentation are available on request — ask the team.