The European Rental Association (ERA) has published a guide called ‘Discover Rental’ – the guide is aimed at providing information on construction equipment rental to any person interested in getting more familiar with the benefits of rental.

To achieve this goal, the guide, developed by the the ERA Promotions Committee, focuses on a number of issues such as:

• The cost benefits of rental
• What construction equipment can typically be rented and by which industries
• How to choose a rental company
• Rental as a sustainable option
• Fact and figures about Europe’s rental industry

The Discover Rental Guide is available to download by clicking here

ERA Promotions Committee
May 2011

rentalresult can show you, when investing in our software, how you may achieve significant returns on your investment. Here are some examples;

• Using the Asset Controller to maximize assets and inventory utilization
• Empower your staff by using our CRM / Customer Service modules
• Automate your Rental , Sales and Operational processes with the new Rules Engine
• Improve customer retention by staying ahead with state of the art information software
• Reduce the number of account queries by issuing accurate invoices
• Make more informed decisions with integrated real time reporting
• E-commerce capabilities simplifying Customer rental, purchases and account co-ordination
• Implementation methodologies to reap the benefits of your investment quickly.

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We’re talking about saving real money here.

What are you waiting for?

Invest in rentalresult

Your business, your rules, your results

Paul Looker
Result Group, Inc.

Loss from operations for the first quarter of 2011 was $2.9 million, or 2.1 percent of revenues, compared with loss from operations of $11.9 million, or 10.4 percent of revenues, a year ago. Net loss was $6.5 million for the quarter compared to a net loss of $12.1 million in the first quarter of 2010.

Gross margins were 26.0 percent as compared to 20.8 percent a year ago. Rental gross margins increased to 35.4 percent compared to 21.7 percent a year ago. Average time utilization (based on units available for rent) increased to 61.0 percent compared to 49.7 percent last year. Average time utilization (based on original equipment cost) increased to 64.9 percent compared to 51.2 percent a year ago.
Average rental rates turned positive in March on a year-over-year basis. Dollar utilization was 27.9 percent in the first quarter compared to 22.0 percent a year ago.

Average rental fleet age at March 31, 2011, was 43.2 months compared to an industry average of about 53 months, according to H&E.

“We are extremely pleased with our first quarter results and the ongoing improvements in our business,” said John Engquist, H&E Equipment Services’ president and CEO. “Despite normal seasonality that was compounded by historically inclement weather in many of our end markets, our business delivered solid year-over-year improvements in revenue, gross profit and EBITDA. The trends in our rental business remain particularly strong as revenue increased 33.0 percent, gross profit increased 116.7 percent and gross margins increased from 21.7 percent to 35.4 percent despite a slight decline in rental rates from a year ago,” Enquist said. “We were pleased to see rates turn positive on a year-over-year basis in the month of March. Furthermore, the second quarter has started on a positive note with solid year-over-year gains in April rental rates. Visibility in our distribution business remains limited. While new earthmoving equipment sales were strong, the lack of large crawler crane sales negatively impacted new equipment sales compared to the fourth quarter,” he said.

“Our outlook for the second quarter is positive as we expect the improvement in industrial construction markets to accelerate. However, we do not expect a broad recovery in non-residential construction markets to occur until 2012. In spite of this, we expect our losses to moderate for the remainder of 2011,” Engquist said. “The activity in our industrial markets remains strong, especially in our Gulf Coast and Intermountain regions as a result of rising oil and commodity prices. Demand for early cycle earthmoving equipment continues to increase and we are beginning to see improved rental rates. With a solid capital structure and excellent liquidity, we believe we have positioned our business very well to take advantage of any improvements in market conditions.”

Rental Pulse 8th May 2011

Click here to read this article

Internal projects, internal SLA agreements, the need to provide project, WBS code or task code breakdowns of all costs and charges to constructions sites add a potentially heavy burden of administration and management that external equipment rental companies can avoid. Equally, the internal rental business often has to deal with a much wider variety of equipment than a traditional rental business, often renting in not only tools and equipment, but operators, transport and fleet vehicles to meet the varying and rapidly changing demands of multiple construction sites.

Given this environment, rental software has to offer some very specific features. Often one of the most important is the ability to manage the rental not just of owned assets but of very large volumes of sub-rented assets efficiently and cleanly ensuring there is a clean transition from rental to sub-rent purchase and the comprehensive control of sub-rental invoices in the AP to ensure that costs and revenue are tracked. Equally, in an internal business the whole process of invoicing may be streamlined to the point where you simply raise GL Charges rather than generating unnecessary invoices. It must be possible to store project data at the rental contract, purchase order, sales contract, sub rental, work order and any other point where costs or revenue might be accrued to ensure you can provide accurate costing data to the project managers, surveyors and construction teams that you are supporting.

All of these features are available in the rentalresult rental and asset management software allowing you to manage your rental business profitability, whilst still providing the asset and project charges that the construction project teams require within the corporate systems. The flexibility of the application allows you to manage and support multiple types of equipment, including operated equipment such as cranes, as well as handling external customers alongside internal clients when you wish to do so.

Alongside our standard system features we have also provided a technology platform that provides construction companies with clear productivity and accuracy benefits. Our rules engine allows you to define workflow and to build product configurators to assist your internal rental team in identifying the right equipment for the job, even if they have little knowledge of the specific equipment. Our e-commerce engine allows site managers to place their own orders on line, confirm that they are happy with rates and order details, check their equipment on rent and get access to all of their contracts, invoices and history. Our comprehensive SOA platform provides the flexibility to integrate to the major corporate systems like Oracle in real-time saving any need for double entry.

Helen Sowerby
Sr VP Business Development
Result Group

View from the Edge

This blog is an open discussion of what it takes to design, build, integrate and manage the world’s best business applications using Progress OpenEdge.

Posted by Colleen Smith on the Progress OpenEdge website

Click here to read this blog

This blog is an open discussion of what it takes to design, build, integrate and manage the world’s best business applications using Progress OpenEdge.

Posted by Colleen Smith on the Progress OpenEdge website

Click here to read this blog

Cut back on hours as well as any spending. Day-to-day business processes have been streamlined down so that you can do more with less. Now that the economy is on somewhat of an upswing, how will you be able to do even more with less?

The upswing is expected to be slow

Your company will still be faced with competition slashing their rental rates and increasing their customer service levels. Your larger customers are still going to be coming to you looking for better rates. Money is still going to be tight and buying new equipment will be tough, so you will need to get even more out of your equipment.

Maintaining equipment

Keeping customers satisfied with your equipment, and trusting that your equipment is not going to fail on the job is going to be a tough line to walk. So, the question you are asking yourself is, “How will you increase your profitability?”

To increase profits you will need to do more with less when it comes to every aspect of your business

Our rentalresult software was built to let our customers provide better customer service, increase asset utilization, streamline business processes and increase profits. One example of rentalresult’s streamlining a business process is through our exclusive Rules Engine.

Customers are guided through a series of questions

About the type of work they are doing and how the equipment will be used. Depending on their answers to the question, it will provide them with a list of available equipment to choose from. This is just one way to increase customer service and decrease the demand these calls have at your rental desk, you can for example also cut labor costs by up to 50%.

We have many ways to help your business grow

Just like we have with some of the largest rental companies around the world. If you would like to learn more about our solution and how we can help your business do more with less, give us a call today.

Your business, your rules, your results

Kevin Nolan
Sales Manager
Result Group, Inc.

kevin.nolan@rentalresult.com

Kevin has been involved in the rental industry for the past six years providing software solutions to many large rental companies.  Prior to joining Result Group, he gained his knowledge of the rental industry from years of managing a rental operation.

The equipment rental industry, like many others, deals with a lot of complex, labor and information intensive business processes. Today’s technologies create opportunities to reduce the amount of effort and increase accuracy for many different processes. This article explores five different ways you can automate labor intensive or error prone business process to positively impact your profitability. As a reference, the article also explores how our product, rentalresult, accomplishes automation in these five areas.

1) Automate your customer transactions with ecommerce

Although considered tricky in the construction and industrial equipment rental market, there are still a fair amount of customers who would like to use a website to place and manage their orders. Even if only 10 percent of your customers could use the web to do their business, for many rental companies this would dramatically decrease inbound phone calls. By freeing up employees from answering phones, they can take on additional revenue generating activities. In addition, by adding smarter technology to your website, such as the rentalresult Business Rules Engine and Product Configurator, you can ensure those customers who need assistance choosing the correct equipment for the job, get the guidance they need without human intervention.

Our e-commerce module allows customers to get quotes and place orders in a fully integrated platform. This means orders show up without someone having to rekey orders from one system into another.

Details Page of Product - Rates, images, descriptions and availability come from same system your internal employees use.

The Product Configurator guides an uneasy customer through the selection process

2) Automate your rate guidance

On Demand Pricing will look at several factors and automatically suggest optimized rates.

Leaving your front line employees to guess the best rates to charge on any given day based on their perception of demand, utilization and current market pricing leaves a large opportunity for errors. Often, perception is not reality. By implementing an on-demand pricing engine, your system can use real-time utilization, reservations, and actual “in-play” rates to suggest the most optimal rate to charge for a rental.

3) Automate your Maintenance Management

Configuring your system to automatically open a workshop order and notify the appropriate people can save many hours that usually get spent by your workshop team researching what needs to be done. In addition, by switching to a more proactive business process, you can prevent slips that cause your equipment to fall out of a good maintenance routine. By automating, you gain more workshop resource time for maintenance and repair work as well as more uptime for your equipment.

Our Asset Controller visually notifies the workshop personnel of equipment due for service or inspection.

rentalresult allows you to configure all preventative maintenance intervals and certification intervals into the system as well as auto-generate workshop orders, saving hours of administrative work.

4) Automate your employee guidance

Both turnover and the need for a constantly evolving business in today’s market can mean consistent interaction of your front-line employees with your customers and vendors may suffer. By building important business rules into the system that front-line employees use during most interactions, you can help ensure consistent behavior as people or business rules change. This will improve customer relationships, prevent costly mistakes and make a more productive front-line employee regardless of experience.

Help employees follow best company best practices when placing orders.

Help employees handle equipment issue phone calls by walking through consistent business rules and processes.

The rentalresult Business Rules Engine, easily allows your administrators or management team to design workflow that can guide your front-line employees. This ultimately makes the right thing to do, the easy thing to do, ensuring opportunities are not missed and costly mistakes are avoided.

5) Automate your exception reporting

Too often, managers must generate and print countless reports, weed through the data and hope to catch an anomaly indicating a problem. By switching to exception based reporting and pushing the information as events occur to the relevant people, countless hours can be saved and critical problems can be quickly identified before you lose an opportunity or incur a significant cost.

By embedding into rentalresult a best of breed business intelligence solution and providing over 350 canned reports, users can set up any exception report to be sent to them when something important occurs. Dashboards also help manage exceptions by displaying important metrics visually so you do not have to dig through pages of printed reports.

Re-rent management is one of those areas it can be easy to lose sight of opportunities to save money. This dashboard quickly points out potential problems.

Summary

These five process automation suggestions are all things being done by various rental companies today, although few are doing all five. As you evaluate your business, work with your software provider to find out what you can do today with your existing product. Some rental companies will end up bringing in third-party tools and others will use in-house programmers or pay their software provider for customizations to existing software. rentalresult customers, however, have the advantage of being able to take advantage of all five of these automations and many more as part of the base package. If you would like to find out more about rentalresult, contact us by clicking here.

Your business, your rules, your results 

Michael Baron
Result Group, Inc.

michael.baron@rentalresult.com

If your equipment could talk, what would it tell you, what would you actually hear, and what would you do about it?  Enter telematics and rental management system integration. Telematics is the technology that combines communication and information to monitor and report on machines like construction equipment and vehicles.  It is what gives your equipment the ability to “talk.” Just as important as the ability of equipment to “talk” is whether your key systems can receive, or “hear,” and understand the information and whether processes have been designed to act on the information.  When all these pieces are in place, telematics can deliver real business value. Benefits to help drive value include:

• Knowing exactly where a piece of equipment is located
• Knowing your equipment’s real time service meter
• Knowing if an exception events occur, such as unauthorized use
• Knowing if an unplanned maintenance issue arises

Although telematics in the equipment rental industry has been around for a while there is only a small subset of rental companies using it significantly as the rental industry as a whole has been slow to adopt the technology.  There are various factors that have probably contributed to the lack of adoption.  These include, pricing of the technology, lack of standardization and lack of integration into rental management systems.  

Today, however, these factors are being addressed making it much more compelling for rental companies to adopt the technology.  Pricing, as with most technology, has come down over time and the Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP) has delivered a standard that is now being adopted by equipment manufacturers and independent telematics providers.   In addition, some rental management systems are providing excellent integration with telematic data, which has been driving significant benefits. 

For example, rentalresult, combines telematic data with the billing process to ensure overtime billings are accurate and timely.   One of our customers implemented this functionality and significantly grew their top and bottom line during a time of economic recession.  rentalresult also consolidates telematic data to track specific equipment senor readings, making it available to be used in other parts of the system, such as our built-in business intelligence module.  For example, to prevent unauthorized usage, a dashboard can be created and pushed to let rental coordinators know which equipment has significant usage but is on a pickup ticket.

Tight integration between rentalresult, telematic information, and geo-aware tools drives significant business value

As the technology matures further and the AEMP standards are expanded, rental companies will be able to use rentalresult to drive telematic based process improvement even further.  If you have not already done so, now is the time to relook at what telematics has to offer and how to leverage your current system to take advantage of today’s telematic technology.  For more information about rentalresult‘s capabilities, Contact Us today.

Michael Baron
Result Group, Inc.

michael.baron@rentalresult.com

Prior to joining Result Group, Michael spent over 12 years providing technology solutions to the Rental Industry while holding key leadership roles at both technology and leading rental companies.