Key Features of STAEDEAN Rental Management for Dynamics 365 F&SCM

The equipment rental industry has evolving trends, such as artificial intelligence, digitalization, improving customer relations, etc. A changing landscape with new technology compels you to adopt the latest software to support changing business processes.

While looking for a rental solution that would fit your equipment rental or industrial manufacturing business, you’d want to answer one question: What are the features I can expect from an optimal rental solution?

As a rental solution provider for almost two decades, we at STAEDEAN are often asked this very question. To make your solution hunt easier, we will share the features you can expect from our rental software solution for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management called STAEDEAN Rental Management.

Overview of our rental solution: STAEDEAN Rental Management for Dynamics 365 F&SCM

STAEDEAN Rental Management is an end-to-end, cloud-based, rental-specific solution embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management. It leverages the full Microsoft technology stack and offers a single source of truth for the entire rental lifecycle.

Here is a visual overview of how STAEDEAN Rental Management seamlessly embeds within Dynamics 365 F&SCM

What are the key features of STAEDEAN Rental Management for Dynamics 365 F&SCM?

1. Standard and adaptable suite

STAEDEAN Rental Management provides a documented and simplified overview of standard rental processes to align with your organization's strategy. With end-to-end process automation, your manual effort and time are reduced. The solution offers over 150 standardized business processes, such as rental, fleet, supply chain, billing, assets, and contracts management. However, you can choose functionalities that fit your business needs.

From daily rental operations to comprehensive planning and analytics, STAEDEAN Rental Management can handle simple tool rentals, complex project-driven rentals, rental/sales kits, bulk items, serialized inventory, and multiple revenue streams.

2. Rental management

STAEDEAN Rental Management manages the global lifecycle of your equipment from pre-rental checks, on-rent, off-rent, and workshop, to being rental-ready again. The solution can combine rental equipment with the sale of consumables on a consolidated invoice, making it a quicker and more efficient process.

With a 360-degree view of all your assets, rental data, and processes, you have end-to-end visibility across your global rental fleet. Based on the data available, you can better anticipate business needs, improve rental operations, and enhance customer experience.

3. Service and maintenance management

Equipment maintenance in STAEDEAN Rental Management runs efficiently on a comprehensive, template-based work order system to carry out and manage all kinds of service tasks to reduce equipment downtime. You can get an up-to-date and accurate maintenance overview of services, including preventive, corrective, pre-emptive, and delayed maintenance.  

Manual effort is also eliminated with automatic triggers, workflows, forms linked with customer records, and centralized data.

4. Transport management

The transport logistics around your equipment — where it is, how it’s moving, and transport planning are all taken care of by STAEDEAN Rental Management. With the information available, you can plan your fleet to execute quality checks and accurately pick and ship rental orders.

The graphical transport planning tools ensure efficient delivery of internal and external equipment, with which you can streamline planning, logistics, and execution across depots.

5. Delivery and returns management

STAEDEAN Rental Management can accurately manage the picking and shipping of rental orders, monitor mass returns, track equipment location, execute quality checks, and report damages with a scan-and-check capability. You have the ability to schedule delivery and returns with complete insight into the location, status, and availability of equipment and its sub-parts.

You can also deliver and return equipment to workers on-site with the rental shop functionality. With visibility and control over all sites of your equipment, you can manage your rental equipment across several legal entities to maximize utilization.

6. Artificial intelligence capabilities

STAEDEAN Rental Management's AI-based feature, 'Product Recommendation Engine,' offers insights into frequently bought/rented-together products by your customers. With this functionality, you can train your item recommendation model through machine learning using data collected from previous customer rental orders over a period.

You can use this data to propose 'recommended items' to your customers to increase sales, improve contextual cross-selling, and strengthen customer relations.

7. Equipment and fleet management

With STAEDEAN Rental Management, you can efficiently manage your fleet with the right balance between fleet apportionments and assigned versus requested fleets. Having data on equipment availability and location, enables your rental assets to be scheduled and monitored across rental contracts or projects that span multiple months.

The ‘Asset management’ functionality within STAEDEAN Rental Management supports processes, lifecycles, and service requirements for equipment and sub-parts, so planners can schedule accurately, minimize service gaps, and reduce overhead costs.

8. Graphical dashboards

STAEDEAN Rental Management has a graphical dashboard with an intuitive user interface that allows relevant users to have a visual summary of each equipment work order comprehensively. You can see the appropriate maintenance, transport tasks, and utilization for each piece of equipment, resulting in easy and efficient planning and scheduling.

With real-time visibility and access to assets, resources, vehicles, and fleet availability, you can generate tailored quotes and check work orders directly from the dashboards.

9. Mobile app

Your rental company’s field engineers and technicians can be empowered with access to data anytime, anywhere through the mobile app in our solution. It provides real-time visibility into data and a single platform to maintain all field service processes, enabling field service engineers to provide seamless, quality service to clients.

Administrative processes and tasks, such as invoicing and scheduling, are accelerated with instant visibility of information to the back-office team. The solution boosts field service performance with geo-location, electronic signatures, and offline capabilities.

10. Plug-and-play analytics

Our analytics add-on solution – STAEDEAN Analytics for Rental, uses pre-built, plug-and-play analytics, and business intelligence to measure specific metrics and help you make informed business-critical decisions.

You can optimize your rental operations with industry-leading, end-to-end analytics with quick access to data and insights. Some metrics measured include maintenance costs, number of breakdowns, fleet age, new rental customers, etc.

11. Dedicated customer portal

The STAEDEAN Rental Customer Portal is an add-on solution to empower your customers with information on their rented equipment and usage. By allowing your rental customers to manage their rented equipment through automated information sharing, there is a decreased dependency on your teams.

Implementing an easy and customer-friendly solution with which your target audience can get visibility into equipment anytime and anywhere can increase customer loyalty and improve operational efficiency.

12. Lead-to-cash process management

You can handle the entire lead-to-cash rental process in one location to sell better to your prospects and customers with an automated sales and marketing add-on solution, STAEDEAN Rental Management for D365 Sales. The solution connects Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) to STAEDEAN Rental Management embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM (ERP).

The sync-up of CRM and ERP data aligns the sales and marketing teams with the supply chain teams and offers a unified data view on rental equipment, enabling your sales team to generate quick rental quotes and close deals faster.

Is STAEDEAN Rental Management the right solution for your equipment rental business?

With an understanding of the key features offered by our rental solution, we hope you are better positioned to decide whether it’s the right fit for your rental business. The solution is certified for Microsoft Dynamics and follows the monthly upgrade policy of Microsoft, ensuring a future-proof rental solution that always runs on the latest version.

If you are an existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM user, you can easily add greater value to your rental-specific processes with the STAEDEAN Rental Management solution. Book a demo with our experts, who will be happy to guide you in optimizing your rental operations.