Be my Guest... Leanne Whitehurst-Maiden
Kicking off the New Year in a new role is Leanne Whitehurst-Maiden who has returned to Rope and Sling Specialists (RSS) as their National Digitalisation Manager.
Whitehurst-Maiden previously worked for RSS as their sales/hire coordinator from December 2015 - September 2023. Prior to returning to RSS she was sales director & senior business development manager EMEA, at RiConnect.
“I started back in January in a completely new role, but with a company I know very well as I've worked here previously for the best part of a decade. It's nice to be back, and its a completely new task for me, working as a national member of staff covering all the depots, promoting digitalisation through the business as a whole,” said Whitehurst-Maiden.
“I’ll be heading up RSS Live365, which is a newish project that we're working on. It's a multi-faceted project, covering lots of aspects of the business. Predominantly, it focuses on our digital inspection offering. So we have a portal that we offer to customers, where inspections are digitalised and we can focus on compliance and traceability so we can futureproof the business and move towards a digital lifting industry.
“One aspect of the project is our nationwide training of all our personnel. RSS really does strive to focus on training for all our staff and we see it as continual personal development. We are continually striving to make sure our personnel are very well trained and very well supported and one aspect of Live365 will be the digital training of everyone through all aspects of the business.
“We have a hire fleet that we have invested heavily in over the past couple of years to ensure we've got fantastic equipment that we send out to customers and digitalising aspects of that will be an important part of the project as well.
“We are seeing a lot around digitalisation in the industry at the moment. It's coming from a lot of different aspects, so obviously we can see it through LEEA, where there's a push towards digitalisation, and we see it through our suppliers that are increasingly moving towards digital products. We see it through customers who want increased traceability.
“And as a company we are looking to improve standardization, efficiency and a lot of customers are wanting the same as well, so they want their processes to be simpler.
Time is money. We don't want to be spending a lot of time doing something that we can simplify. So, we're synchronising systems within the business and we are hoping that from a personnel point of view, they're going to see improvements and particularly through our customer offering.
“Next, we are focusing on standardization. We are bringing that into the business in a big way, taking everything to the next level now as we're growing rapidly. In the past couple of years we have opened more depots and as the business grows, we've got to synchronise our systems and standardize our processes to make things a lot simpler.”
Click here to watch the video on LEEA YouTube.
