For over 40 years, Equimax has been a leading heavy equipment dealer in the Dominican Republic. They cater to the agriculture, construction, and transportation sectors as well as feature equipment such as tractors, excavators, forklifts, power generators, auto-buses, and trucks. In 2014, the company decided to shift gears so they could cater to an ever-growing customer base. They realized that they could lower costs and make their heavy equipment rental business more accessible to customers by renting out idle equipment. And so, Equimax’s rental division was born.
This was a promising new venture. However, the new project had a unique set of challenges. Equimax’s entire sales operations were managed on an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. When the company expanded into the rental market, the system could not support complicated rental workflows. For example, items were leaving the warehouse, coming back, being serviced, and then going to another customer. Meanwhile, the ERP system could only create basic orders and process invoices.
Equimax required greater granularity. Daniela Figuereo, Project Coordinator at Equimax, walks us through the company’s initial struggle with the new rental division and how rental software helped streamline its operations.
Equimax struggles with gaining operative control
The existing ERP system did not have the functionality to sync rental orders with item availability. This meant that Equimax had to manually manage the entire rental lifecycle. This translated into three main roadblocks.
Tracking equipment took too long
Every time a rental order was placed, technicians had to physically go to the warehouse and verify equipment availability. This was a time-intensive task but Equimax could not take orders without performing this check. Additionally, there was no way to verify whether unavailable items were with a customer, in maintenance, or just lost.
No actionable insights on rental inventory
Equimax couldn’t calculate critical metrics like asset utilization or total cost of ownership for their equipment. Employees had to spend hours putting transactions into an Excel spreadsheet to get these critical business insights. These files would then be further processed to generate the required KPIs. Equimax realized that this was tedious manual work which was frustrating their team.
Competitors were ahead with automated operations
The rental industry was moving towards digitization and key players were implementing rental software to streamline their processes. In this climate, relying on an ERP system was impacting business negatively. Determined to make a change, the team began their search for a robust rental management system to automate their workflows. After extensive online research, they discovered EZRentOut. EZRentOut offered a comprehensive rental business management solution which was a perfect fit for their business needs.
Equimax opts for rental management to automate operations
Equimax found the software intuitive and extremely easy to use. This meant the entire team was trained to use the new software very quickly. A major part of this seamless, easy adoption was the extremely helpful and responsive support team at EZRentOut.
Once the rental software was set up, Equimax was ready to see results.
Shorter rental cycles
First, there was a major improvement in their order processing time. Now, service representatives can easily verify item locations with a few clicks on their devices. They could also consult the Availability Calendar to check if a piece of equipment was available, in service, or rented out for the required duration. With complete visibility and automated equipment tracking, order preparation became much easier. Equimax shortened its rental order lifecycle and improved both employee and customer satisfaction.
Improved forecasting
Transitioning to a digital solution also enabled Equimax’s rental division to become more data-centric. With EZRentOut, they had a complete overview of all their items and orders. They could maintain comprehensive data logs and item histories for their entire inventory.EZRentOut uses this data to provide rental businesses with insightful rental metrics. Equimax utilized this data to improve its forecasting and business strategy. The Dashboard made these data points available from a single location. They would also run item and order reports to analyze business performance.
Automating workflows
As the Project Coordinator, Daniela was tasked with optimizing the use of the rental software. She identified new and useful modules. Equimax then implemented these modules to maximize ROI. Today, they use a broad range of functions including order management, asset management, customer management, maintenance, reporting, and analytics for everyday operations.
The future with EZRentOut
Moving forward, Equimax is looking to offer self-service rentals online. They plan to offer an automated 24-hour service. The EZRentOut Webstore will be instrumental in implementing this plan.
Meanwhile, Daniela confirms that the company has seen significant improvement in business processes, productivity, and a reduction in costs since automating its operations. Equimax identifies EZRentOut as a key catalyst in its growth.
“The communication was really great. Any problem we had got solved in a day or two typically. Responsiveness was huge!”
