Michiel Toppers
Picture this: Your repeat customer, a construction company, approaches your equipment rental business to rent a 150-ton capacity crane for a week. Knowing they have two 150-ton cranes, the front office team immediately promises the crane, only to realize that one is already on rent and the other is under maintenance.
Not wanting to disappoint your valued regular customer, you are forced to offer the next best thing – a 200-ton crane, but at the previously agreed upon rates, which is a lower fee for a 200-ton crane. This results in a loss for you and affects your fleet, as you had to allocate a greater capacity crane to the customer.
All this chaos is because your teams did not have the right information at the right time due to operating in silos.
The challenge of information silos exacerbates when you bring multiple pieces of equipment and numerous customers into the picture.
With over 18 years of experience offering rental software embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, we have helped numerous rental businesses streamline information and communication silos.
This blog will share the challenges rental companies face with information silos and how equipment rental software can effectively address them.
Equipment rental software plays a crucial role in preventing information silos within an organization by facilitating seamless data sharing and communication across various departments.
Here are four key ways in which equipment rental software helps prevent information silos:
Not knowing the location of each piece of equipment in your fleet directly impacts multiple operations within the rental lifecycle. Without readily available data on the equipment’s location — whether it’s on-site with the customer or in the warehouse under maintenance, you will not be able to plan your rental inventory.
All these information gaps make it a nightmare to schedule rental orders and bookings, making you lose money, time, and resources.
The right equipment rental software provides information on the asset's location through asset-tagging methods. With this, you can always track and monitor the site of your rental equipment.
Different teams (operations, front office, service and maintenance, transport, billing) can get the correct information at the right time. Knowing where your equipment is helps you stay updated on your equipment's availability and utilization, further simplifying the planning process.
Furthermore, by incorporating technology such as IoT in your rental business, you can protect usage according to the rental contract and ensure accurate invoicing to the customer.
Equipment rental contracts are usually lengthy, complex, and involve multiple stakeholders. This becomes more complicated when you rent out to rental projects with global operations.
Not having the data about pricing or the legal details of the rental agreement causes a flurry of trouble for you and your customers. Quoting inaccurate pricing results in revenue and reputation loss, negatively impacting your business in the long term.
Equipment rental software has an advanced document management system for pricing agreements and rental contracts.
Respected teams can quickly create contracts and pricing terms with a unified dashboard of all the details. With a centralized data view, your sales team can generate quotes quicker and see cleared invoices, outstanding credits, or delayed payments.
Additionally, you can opt for rental software that supports CRM so your sales team can manage the lead-to-cash process and easily provide equipment-related information to the prospects, decreasing the sales cycle.
Ensuring your equipment is rental-ready and safe to rent out is essential to maximizing asset utilization. Delayed downtime of assets is the quickest way of losing revenue in your rental business.
If the communication between your front-office and back-office teams is not streamlined, maintenance could be delayed, leading to customer dissatisfaction or penalties for unsafe conditions.
To prevent operational disruptions due to maintenance lags, you must invest in rental software that can thoroughly support rental equipment maintenance.
The right rental ERP software must support both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. With accurate maintenance plans, you avoid anticipated breakdowns and reduce equipment recalls.
You can increase the response time to equipment maintenance calls with a rental mobile app that offers field engineers and technicians remote access to data when on-site.
In the equipment rental business, each customer has unique needs, and you must be able to put together attractive offers on the fly based on the customer's request.
For instance, many construction rental projects require bundle packages. However, if your front office and field teams are not well synced, you cannot provide the necessary combination of services, losing potential income.
Equipment rental software offers a single source of truth to ensure you have all the information for configuring offers based on the varying customer demands. With well-oiled communication among different departments, you can build rental kits or offer bundle packages.
Some rental software solutions incorporate artificial intelligence to recommend 'frequently rented products' based on the customer's purchase history, increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
As explained above, investing in equipment rental software helps your business overcome all the challenges that come along with siloed information. It enables you to avoid double bookings, errors in rental agreements, billing issues, idle equipment, etc.
You can avoid information silos by introducing the right equipment rental software in your business. To know how to look for the solution that fits your needs, check out the features to consider in equipment rental software.
To kickstart your journey to embracing rental software in your business, review the tipsheet linked below, which shares information on the:
