Redesigning phygital
operations for North America's
largest equipment rental company.
Turning a manual, error-prone RFID tagging process into a unified, role-aware digital experience — from fieldwork to the branch office.
A physical Gearbox. A broken digital backbone.
Sunbelt Rentals' Gearbox is a mini branch installed directly on a customer's job site — construction crews can grab equipment on demand using RFID. The physical experience worked. The digital layer managing asset tagging, inventory, and operations did not.
The tagging and pairing process was manual, slow, and error-prone. Field staff — often working in poor-network, high-noise environments — were spending more time wrestling with software than managing equipment. Branch managers had no unified visibility across assets, patrons, and transactions.
The ask: redesign the hand scanner application and its operational processes to increase productivity, improve accuracy, and build a system that could scale across 1,100+ locations.
Research first. Always.
Before any wireframe, the team ran structured discovery — remote stakeholder workshops, field user interviews, and a systematic logging of every friction point across the existing product.
Three principles that governed every decision.
For everyone's need
The same interface had to work for a field tech with gloves on a job site and a branch manager reviewing reports in an office. Context-awareness, not one-size-fits-all.
For solving together
Identical asset and transaction views across all user roles. No siloed dashboards. Shared workspace so teams could act on the same data without translation overhead.
For every user
Guided onboarding, contextual help, and simplified task flows for a user base that ranges from seasoned ops managers to new field hires with limited tech fluency.
Structured delivery. Two pods. 11 weeks.
Work split into parallel pods — Navigation + Asset Management (Pod 1) and Transactions + User Management (Pod 2) — each with a UX Lead and Visual Designer, coordinated by an ACD.
Single Pane UX — one view, all roles.
Identical views of assets and transactions across Equipment Rental Specialists, Technicians, and Profit Centre Managers — no more role-switching or data silos.
Measurable outcomes, not just delivery.
Improved tagging & pairing
QR + RFID automation with bulk actions replaced the fully manual process. Tagging errors dropped; throughput increased from day one.
Better operational visibility
Operational dashboards, smart notifications, and real-time reporting gave branch managers a single source of truth across assets, transactions, and patron data.
Accurate inventory management
Cross-functional collaboration and smart discrepancy detection kept inventory records reliable — reducing ghost assets and missing-return incidents.
Productivity boost
Prioritised task queues, automated repetitive actions, and smart search compressed daily task time for both field specialists and branch managers.
You all have performed admirably. Gives us a great deal of confidence that we can make our partnership work. Thank you for showing up as y'all have to get us to a good place. We look forward to continuing our partnership.