How to Improve Your Equipment Rental and Sales Operations Efficiency

Considerations to plan your business transformation to streamline process and reduce costs

You need to know where your equipment is at all times, when service is needed and when to invoice. To truly be effective and make the process seamless – and EASY – this means automating operations in terms of scheduling, enabling predictive maintenance, keeping your technicians informed and billing acceleration.

Here’s four things to consider when undertaking such a project:

1. Pick the right system. For most equipment dealers, whether sales or rental, your business operations require a combination of solutions. You need a way to keep up with equipment maintenance history, lifecycle of parts and equipment, inventory levels and coordinate parts delivery and service scheduling. Maintaining multiple systems to manage all these tasks can lead to manual processes that are error prone, require additional resources, and result in loss of revenue. These problems can be avoided by starting with a solution that seamlessly combines all the needed functionality in one interconnected system. Look for a single platform that combines asset lifecycle management with work order management, field service management, and integration to billing systems. This will ensure timely and accurate information flows and faster billing cycles.
2. Find ways to reduce maintenance costs. Costly breakdowns and subsequent down time equal lost revenue. Preventive and predictive maintenance greatly accelerate maintenance cost reduction. Preventive maintenance is based on providing service when the asset is expected to need it while predictive maintenance uses IoT sensors to track the health and condition of the equipment. Predictive maintenance adds an extra layer of benefit in terms of minimizing the number of unexpected breakdowns, maximizing uptime and reliability, reducing operational costs, improving technician scheduling efficiencies, as well as serving to future-proof your business. Additional predictive analytics-based advanced services can also be enabled for deeper insights
3. Embrace the service contract to bill process. What does that mean exactly? It means connecting your field service, work and asset management system directly to your accounting software through real-time integration. This provides a bidirectional flow of data between your accounting system’s general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and other modules as needed. By automating these manual processes, you can reduce errors and rework by eliminating rekeying of data and manual oversight. It increases billing accuracy and accounting productivity so you can invoice faster, have shorter collection times and quicker revenue recognition
4. Maintain high technician engagement. Workforce mobility is changing everything about how field technicians do their work. With easy access to work order, asset and inventory information from anywhere, at any time, your technician productivity will soar. Make sure your selected solution includes an app that was developed with technicians in mind and makes their job easier in the field. To ensure adoption, it’s important to involve your technicians early in the selection process and get them onboard, as well as choosing a solution that is easy to learn and use.

Get started on the road to transforming your business today. To learn more about how you can deliver exceptional customer service and gain an edge over your competition, visit our resource library.