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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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: