Quick Summary:
For the last few years equipment rentals have been trending upwards. Today companies, business and individuals are preferring renting the equipment’s they need rather than buying them. With growing popularity of renting equipment’s, the rental companies and equipment dealers are facing an uphill challenge of managing and monitoring their assets.
For any rental business equipment’s are not just costly but also are a direct source of their revenue. Hence it has become more and more important for them to gather data about their equipment availability and usage to improve their asset uptime, longevity, and performance.
Here we’ll look into some of the most common challenges experienced by rental businesses, and talk about ways to overcome them.
- Equipment Location Tracking
- Monitoring Equipment Availability
- Tracking Equipment Utilisation
- Forecasting Equipment Maintenance
- Billing Management
- Missed Revenue
- Customer Satisfaction
1. Equipment Location Tracking
Rental companies rent out hundreds and thousands of equipment’s daily to their customers. These equipment’s are often deployed at some very far off locations where physically tracking them regularly is a huge challenge. Most of the time equipment’s get stolen from the job site which results in productivity losses and replacing them can be costly.
The Solution…
- A platform that gives you the flexibility to visualize the real-time location of all your equipment’s at one place.
- Allows you to configure geofence your equipment.
- Sends automatic triggers/alerts to users whenever the equipment is moved away from its jobsite.
2. Monitoring Equipment Availability
In rental business it is important to correctly track which of your equipment are currently available, which are on rent, which are on maintenance and how soon they will be available next. Still today most business rely on manual methods like excel and spreadsheets to update the information. This often results in input error and data duplicity resulting in revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction.
The Solution…
- An online automated system that lets you track the complete lifecycle of the equipment from date of booking to the date of closing.
- Let’s you visualize your rental calendar, track and manage your bookings, view reservations etc.
- Automatically send notifications of booked rentals, upcoming bookings, and closed bookings etc.
3. Tracking Equipment Utilization
Unable to track equipment utilization is among the biggest challenge for rental business, that can affect their business in long run. It is important to know which of your equipment are in demand and require additional investment or require maintenance etc.
The Solution…
A platform that lets you make informed decisions based on data insights to help you invest wisely on your resource and inventory management to let you achieve maximum operational excellence.
4. Forecasting Equipment Maintenance
Equipment’s are the major assets that generate revenue for any business especially for rental. Hence it is important to keep your equipment’s well maintained to maximize their life and avoid any unexpected breakdowns thereby improving customer satisfaction.
The Solution…
A solution that supports predictive technology that can anticipate the behaviour of the equipment based on its run hour, maintenance history etc. and can notify you in advance of a required maintenance or possible breakdown to avoid customer dissatisfaction.
5. Billing Management
Managing bills and invoices is one of the most sophisticated parts of any business mostly for rentals. Invoices need to be generated accurately based on equipment usage and agreed contract. Without any accurate means of billing can result in loss.
The Solution…
An easy to access platform that gives you all the information required to billing, pricing etc. on one single dashboard.
6. Missed Revenue
Most of the time when rental companies rent their equipment, they are unable to track the over usage of their equipment that are beyond the agreed terms of rent. This not only adds additional strain to the equipment but also is a missed revenue that could have been charged to the customer.
The Solution…
- Leaveraging IoT technology for your rental business, can help you keep track of your equipment location and their movement from one site to another. Tracking your equipment’s will let you know weather the customer is using your equipment as per agreed rental terms. In case the customer is overusing the equipment you can bill him with additional charges.
7. Customer Satisfaction
Customers expectations and demands are constantly evolving. Customers today increasingly want personalization of services and hence providing an exceptional customer service is the key for a successful business.
Solution for delivering a great customer service…
- Deliver a friction free experience to your customers from day one of your rental booking to the day of closing of rental.
- Take feedback and reviews from your customers and quickly act upon any negative review to make them feel valued.
- Always remember the customer is the king and keep them at the heart of everything your company does by providing relevant and valuable contents.
How an Enterprise IoT Platform like DATOMS can help you overcome the above rental challenges for equipment dealers?
Though there are many ERP solutions available in the market today, they are however very much expensive and also too difficult to implement. They also lack in the resources to meet the needs and requirements of the rental industry.
DATOMS Enterprise Platform offers a fully integrated and specialized solution for the rental industry, that provides real-time insights into the availability and service history of equipment’s and assets along with relevant tools to manage the complete lifecycle of your assets. DATOMS provides users an easy to use, and simple interface supporting powerful AI & ML tools that gets raw data from your equipment’s and turns them to visualized data in minutes.
The success of your business depends on the type of solution you choose for your rental operations. A solution that gives you a complete 360-degree view of your rental operations.
Looking for a remote monitoring solution for your assets?
Do you want more information about our case studies or want to know how our solutions could help your rental business? Get in touch with us today.
