Plant & Equipment Coordinator

Join Our Team: Hire Desk Coordinator (internal title) opportunity

Navigate your future and lock in your career as we keep our canals open and alive.

*** Fixed term contract until September 2027 ***

We are currently searching for a proactive Hire Desk Coordinator to join our Operations team. The Hire Desk provides floating and land base plant and equipment, with technical support for the Trust. Ensuring that our workboats, plant, and equipment are well maintained, serviced and available to meet the needs of our construction and customer operations teams requirements. Having a well-maintained fleet ensures the Trusts programme of works, volunteering opportunities and customer services needs are effectively and efficiently meet. The team also supported the hiring externally floating plant and equipment when required.

In this role you will be responsible for coordination of the Hire Desk to manage all customers enquiries, data management and national communications. This will include: matching resources to planned/unplanned projects and generating reports on plant usage, performance, condition and the repair and maintenance schedule. The post required is to predominantly support the teams that sit within Direct Services but will also be required to support other areas of Infrastructure & Programmes as and when required. As part of your role, you will have the opportunity to shadow our teams to understand their roles and the issues they can encounter. 

Working Hours & Location

This vacancy will be offered on a remote working basis, with a requirement to attend our hub/office spaces as and when required for team working and meetings. It is therefore essential that applicants are able and willing to work effectively from home.

Our hubs include: Ellesmere Port, Hatton, Birmingham, Newark. Applicants would ideally be accessible to Long Eaton (NG10 1AU) for intermittent (one a month) catch ups with the wider team.

See our network map here: https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/canal-and-river-network

Role Overview

The Hire Desk team assist in supporting the Trust’s aims to improve safety and increase the number of people using the waterways by managing the Trust’s fleet of workboats and land-based equipment, to ensure that the fleet is appropriate for the Trust’s needs, that standards are met and that capital investment is effectively delivered.

Key responsibilities

• Provide a plant scheduling service to the Trust, matching available resources to planned and reactive tasks, taking into account geography, the availability of suitable plant and external hire options.
• Manage the communications with all teams using Hire Desk ensuring that all enquiries are managed in a efficient, helpful and conscientious way. Provide technical advice to help develop effective solutions.
• Manage the equipment database for Hire Desk, ensuring all records are up to date. This will include data input, record keeping and record amendments.
• Provide analysis of data on the use of Hire Desk and its equipment through the production of reports, to give evidence for procurement, sale, maintenance and refurbishment of equipment. Also provide reports at the required frequency to provide information on performance such as: Plant utilisation rates; return to service durations following breakdown, number and nature of breakdowns etc.
• Provide financial management support to the Hire Desk team, under the guidance of the Finance Analysts, to ensure effective management of assets, ordering, creating invoices and other financial processes.
• Review, assess and prioritise basic maintenance and repair requirements for plant owned by the Trust in consideration of the available budget and client requirements, passing more complex issues through to expert teams, to ensure the overall availability of a fleet to meet the requirements of the Trust. 

About You

Skills & Qualifications

Technical:

• NVQ Level III / HNC or equivalent in a customer service related discipline within a technical area
• Substantial experience in customer service area. Exposure to managing breakdowns, faults and relevant data is desirable. 
• Substantial experience of administration. Working experience ordering working parts beneficial. 
• Experience logging issues; offering initial solutions support where appropriate. 
• Some knowledge of work safety management, i..e understanding/establishing faults & checking service. 
• Proven budget management experience.
• Proven experience in SAP of benefit. 
• Experienced in the use of word processing and spreadsheet software (Power BI, excel) to write reports - utilisation, issues, orders. 

General:

• Communication skills that allow you to inform, help and advise customers clearly and professionally and liaise with other professionals.
• Listening skills and the ability to deal with difficult situations.
• Confidence, patience, politeness, tact and diplomacy, when addressing customer enquiries.
• Ability to work well under pressure; interpret and implement organisational policies, analyse and process complex technical data.
• Good personal presentation, especially when working with customers face to face.
• Demonstrable ability at a high level for all of the competencies at Level 1 of the Competency Framework.
• Comply with Canal & River Trust Health & Safety policy and defined standards, report incidents, accidents and near misses.
• To be aware of your own responsibilities regarding safeguarding and to support our commitment to providing safe environments and working practises that promote and protect the safety and welfare of children, young people and adults at risk at all time. 

Contact & Application

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at CRT.recruitment@canalrivertrust.org.uk.  We encourage early applications as we may close the vacancy once we receive enough suitable candidates.

What We Offer

In addition to your annual base salary of £29,670, a competitive pension scheme, increasing holiday entitlement, and a range of employee benefits. For a full breakdown of our benefits, check out our brochure here: EVP - 1 (https://canalrivertrust.pagetiger.com/cqhhihy/1).   

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