10 Features to Consider When Looking for An Equipment Rental Software

The equipment rental market is seeing evolving trends, and rental companies must keep up to stay relevant and competitive. Rental businesses are now looking for software solutions that offer company-wide visibility and a more centralized data view to manage their global fleet.

With 18+ years of experience in the equipment rental industry, we have helped several leading rental companies gain end-to-end operational visibility with our rental-specific solution, STAEDEAN Rental Management, embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. During our multiple interactions with global customers, we realized that many businesses don’t know what they require in a rental solution.

Understanding what to consider when looking for an equipment rental solution for your business is essential in making the right decision. This article shares insights into the top features to look for in a rental software solution.

What capabilities should you look for in an equipment rental solution in 2023?

1. Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI)

An equipment rental software solution with advanced analytics, offering dashboards with graphical overviews on KPI-based analytics is a must-have feature. You can leverage business intelligence to get insights into asset performance, utilization rates, booking trends, and more.

With Analytics and Business Intelligence, you can:

• Make calculated predictions about the equipment demand
• Increase the accuracy of your financial planning and budgeting
• Adjust your rental rates and pricing through evidence-based data

2. Innovation

With continually changing technological trends, adopting software that can introduce more innovation in your rental business is crucial.

With a solution that supports innovation, you can:

• Plan strategy based on evolving technology trends
• Be more dynamic with your business offerings
• Leverage role-based business processes

3. IoT - equipment tracking and monitoring

Equipment tracking and monitoring help you stay updated on your equipment's availability, location, and utilization. With solutions supporting IoT, you can monitor the exact usage based on the movement of your assets, enabling you to invoice the customer precisely.

With IoT integration, you can:

• Protect usage according to the rental contract
• Plan preventive maintenance based on equipment utilization
• Enhance customer experience with data analytics on utilization

4. Cloud technology

Cloud-based digitization will be worth $1 trillion by 2030 and is becoming a competitive necessity. Investing in the cloud allows you to simplify ERP and make it more effective by leveraging connectivity, automation, and artificial intelligence.

With cloud technology, you can have:

• Flexibility to scale up with anywhere, anytime access
• Data protection, governance, and role-tailored security
• A future-proof solution that runs on the evergreen version

5. Unified technology stack

The single-tech stack approach provides pre-built business functions, which require far less investment in integration technologies and services. It quickly automates repetitive processes and transactions, leading to significant cost savings.

With single-stack software, you can:

• Simplify your technology investment
• Speed up time to market with rapid automation
• Offer easy user acceptance with a single-user interface

6. End-to-end business processing

A software solution that simplifies your rental processes prevents communication gaps and working in silos. Sophisticated business processing eliminates duplication of effort and the need to populate various systems manually.

With end-to-end business processing, you can:

• Modernize processes for the people and the business
• Reduce time, costs, manual effort, and errors
• Improve operations and productivity

7. Customer focus

Look for a solution that gives you a competitive edge by giving you complete visibility into your customers' journey. You can focus on continuously improving the customer experience from when they first interact with your business till they turn into a revenue-generating sale.

With a customer-focused solution, you can:

• Increase revenue by cross-selling and upselling using AI-based product recommendations
• Empower your customer with a dedicated portal that gives insights into rented equipment
• Track and manage your customer's journey from lead to cash

8. Standardized template-based processes

Find solutions with industry- and business-specific templates so you can trace the functionalities related to your needs and improve operational efficiency. Software solutions that offer advanced technology and pre-configured packages will lead to quicker deployment.

With standardized processes, you can have:

• Company-wide consistency with defined business processes
• Business processes aligned to organizational strategy through guided procedures
• A quicker time to value from pre-built rental-specific processes

9. Transport planning and management

Real-time scheduling, tracking, and managing your equipment’s transportation is also a function that your equipment rental software should be able to provide. Efficient transport planning enables you to minimize asset downtime with accurate scheduling.

With transport planning and management, you can:

• Streamline planning, logistics, and transportation of assets
• Ensure on-time deliveries to customers
• Efficiently allocate products by checking asset availability

10. One source of truth

A rental solution that provides a single source of information means that data, such as customer information, rental orders, accounts, and invoices, are documented in one location. Communication and information exchange becomes effortless with a unified view of data across rental businesses or departments.

With a single source of truth, you can:

• Boost collaboration with seamless and streamlined communication
• Offer easy user adoption with uniform systems and consolidated operations
• Avoid the complexity of manual integrations with one solution

How can we help you get started with an equipment rental solution?

Now that you understand the key features you must consider when shortlisting rental solutions, you can prepare an internal checklist of ‘where you currently are’ and ‘where you want to be’ regarding the technology.

If your long-term business goal is to move to a cloud-based ERP, which offers all the above capabilities and more, you can explore our rental software, STAEDEAN Rental Management. It is a native extension of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management with comprehensive rental-specific capabilities built in.

You could begin evaluating more on selecting the right equipment software to boost your rental business by checking out this comprehensive equipment rental software toolkit.

The toolkit will offer you the following information:

• A buyer's guide to finding the right rental software
• A checklist of the rental ERP essentials
• Various scenarios of how STAEDEAN Rental Management can benefit your business
• Calculating the ROI for your rental software