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Case study 2 — EquipmentShare × Tromml

From question to capability.

Every successful one-off raises the same follow-up: can we do that again next quarter without you?

A consistent pattern shaped the second half of the engagement. EquipmentShare's team would ask a specific question, we'd answer it, and the answer would prove useful enough that the natural follow-up became "can this just keep running?" Four times over, a one-off analysis became something the team can re-run without us.

The four tracks

A

Location-aware fulfillment reporting

A multi-branch operation needs to know where orders are actually being fulfilled from. We added a location-level reporting view to EquipmentShare's analytics stack. It refreshes on its own.

B

Competitive intelligence at scale

Manual competitive research doesn't scale to a catalog of thousands of products. We focused on the small fraction that drive most of the business and built a tool that profiles competitors, pricing, and availability for those products. Quarterly cadence, with a checklist.

C

Channel evaluation, including when to say no

A new marketplace channel had been live long enough to ask whether to invest more. We pulled the full multi-channel comparison, wrote up the structural and strategic context, and gave the team a direct answer: a recommendation against deeper investment, plus the criteria for revisiting the decision later.

D

Inventory and sales as a recurring pipeline

"Don't restock what isn't selling" is a sensible rule. But a product can't sell if it isn't on the shelf. We built a pipeline joining weekly inventory snapshots with multi-channel sales, classifying each product into one of four patterns, and producing stocking-level recommendations. Quarterly refreshes run as a single short job.

How each track worked

A one-off analysis is a snapshot. It answers today's question. But the same question comes back next quarter, often from a different person, often with the original analyst out of the picture. The ad-hoc answer doesn't survive that gap. Methodology drifts. Filters get redefined. The comparison loses rigor.

Each track followed the same shape: figure out what the one-off needed to be re-runnable, write the methodology down so it doesn't drift, document the data caveats so they don't get forgotten, and bring the operational overhead down until running the analysis is a one-command job.

Each track also surfaced data realities worth documenting plainly. The inventory pipeline, for example, had to handle a gap in the historical snapshot record. The methodology marks those weeks as unknown rather than inventing values that might mislead a future analyst.

A note on saying no Not every track ended in a "yes, expand." Track C concluded with a recommendation against deeper investment, plus the criteria for revisiting the recommendation later. The right answer to "should we do more of this?" is sometimes "no." An engagement that says no when no is the answer earns more trust than one that always says yes.
"
I cannot tell you how much that made me feel much better. All the numbers in the world — when somebody backs you up with the same numbers in a different way, it makes it much easier to decide what we're going to do.
Kayla Pluym · EquipmentShare

What stays useful

What EquipmentShare keeps

  • A location-aware fulfillment view that refreshes on its own. Branch-level reporting is one query away.
  • A competitive-intelligence tool with a quarterly checklist, runnable by EquipmentShare's team independently.
  • A channel-evaluation method already applied once, with the criteria for re-applying it on a defined timeline.
  • An inventory-versus-sales pipeline with a methodology document. Quarterly refreshes run as a single short job.