Whether they need an excavator to clear a piece of land, a forklift to move pallets around a warehouse or a pneumatic air hammer to finish up a small construction project, businesses and individuals have both one-time and ongoing needs for equipment they can’t, or don’t want to, purchase.
Construction equipment rental companies meet these needs while also offering repairs, supplies, consumables and other products and services. The US market is currently worth about $4 billion, encompassing nearly 11,000 companies that employ about 28,000 people to manage rentals, field and bench service and point-of-sale (POS) transactions, among other activities.
“Like many other companies, rental firms tend to work with Excel spreadsheets and multiple different ‘homegrown’ systems,” said David McEldowney, CEO at DMC Strategic IT Consulting, a NetSuite Solutions Partner. “For financial management, many of them are still using basic solutions like QuickBooks along with other plug-in applications.”
Knowing that its customers need technology to manage rentals, field and bench service, POS transactions and inventory, DMC extended NetSuite’s ERP capabilities with a SuiteApp, PrecisionERP, that automates and simplifies these and other core business functions. The combined system addresses all aspects of the rental, warranty management, service management and asset lifecycle management process.
Here are four ways construction equipment rental companies can benefit from PrecisionERP and NetSuite when it comes time to upgrade from manual processes:
1. A direct POS/ERP connection point. Rental companies must maintain equipment, keep saleable inventory in stock and ensure that the items they’re renting out are in good working order. Managing these complexities requires a POS platform that communicates directly with the company’s financial system. DMC manages the integration process and ensures that a rental company’s counter and online transactions flow directly into NetSuite — without the need for error-prone manual data input or spreadsheets.
2. Accurate cost tracking. DMC’s PrecisionERP application expands NetSuite’s functionality to address all aspects of the rental, warranty management, service management and asset lifecycle management process. The solution also continually calculates the cost of owning a specific asset, which helps rental companies understand at what point a given piece of equipment becomes more expensive to maintain and rent versus disposing of and replacing it.
3. Performance insights across multiple locations. For rental companies’ back-office operations, NetSuite enables fast consolidation across multiple locations and provides dashboards that show profitability by store. Rental firms with multiple sites get real-time insights into both individual and overall performance. This helps managers stay on top of their own profit-and-loss (P&L) responsibilities.
4. Support for mobile work. DMC also built mobile applications for managing yard-based assets that have to be staged and scheduled for pickup and/or delivery. Apps that can run on either mobile devices or in kiosks enable employees to capture signatures on their mobile phones or other devices, snap photos of equipment before it leaves the premises for damage-tracking and insurance purposes and then compare “before” photos to returned items. Having proof of condition for the hundreds or even thousands of pieces of rental equipment that they manage annually saves rental companies on insurance and lessens the possibility of fraud.
Equipped with accurate and accessible data, rental companies can also forecast their inventory needs, prepare equipment for pickup or delivery and maintain their assets more efficiently than they’d be able to with an on-premises system or using a spreadsheet. By optimizing the steps related to construction equipment rentals, NetSuite and PrecisionERP help reduce labor costs, improve customer service levels and maximize profits.
Learn how to have enough inventory to meet customer demand (opens in new tab)while avoiding stockouts or overordering.