Established in 1966, Kheng Sun has grown from a humble beginning. They started with only one piece of equipment but manage thousands today, ranging from light to compact machinery catering to construction, marine, infrastructure, and landscaping industries.
But how did they tap this level of growth? Managing growing inventories is tricky after all. Years of entirely manual processes coupled with conflicting orders resulted in painstakingly long rental cycles since the company had to manually sift through pages to find, prepare, and dispatch equipment to complete a single order.
Customers naturally weren’t happy about waiting so long. June Liew, working on the digitization process in Kheng Sun, recounts the company’s journey to automation using construction equipment rental software.
Manual tracking never leaves time for core business
Since the beginning of its operations, Kheng Sun has relied on pen and paper for order tracking. Even as times changed and new technologies emerged, they remained loyal to the archaic duo. Over the subsequent years, it became harder to track inventory with physical books as it grew.
But they all boiled down to the same things: the inefficient utilization of manpower and time.
Liew identified three main sources for these troubles:
Tedious manual processes
All the processes for Kheng Sun were solely comprised of pen and paper, nothing more, not even spreadsheets. This meant that the smallest of tasks, such as recording equipment numbers, would be tedious, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
Lack of order visibility
Without an overview of active orders, Kheng Sun would end up with conflicting rental orders. This meant their records showed that the same equipment was seemingly rented out to two customers at a time. Such conflicts made it very time-consuming to find the correct equipment rented out to each customer and made tracking inventory accurately seem like an unachievable process.
Lengthy rental cycles
Customers had to put up with excruciatingly long rental cycles because employees manually catered to all components of an order. With businesses around them shortening the rental cycle by moving to modern solutions, Kheng Sun found itself left behind. Lengthy rental cycles also increased equipment unavailability, thereby negatively impacting profit.
Replacing manual processes with online rental solution
When the company realized how much manpower was going into dealing with these issues, they knew the system couldn’t last.
In pursuit of a modern solution, Liew turned to the internet and found EZRentOut to be the most suitable for the construction industry. It helped simplify and automate their processes in no time.
The software streamlined equipment rental processes eliminated conflicting orders, and made the whole rental flow more efficient for Kheng Sun. EZRentOut’s user-friendly interface, along with the prompt responses from the support team, made the transition especially easy. Transitioning to EZRentOut was trouble-free.
Automating recurring order tracking
After years of manually setting up recurrences, Kheng Sun now found a platform that automated recurrences and auto-generated invoices according to the desired billing period. EZRentOut’s Recurring Orders module enabled them to track a single order easily without getting caught up in piles and piles of invoices.
Tracking outstanding payments
By setting up payment terms for each customer, Kheng Sun disposed of their physical financial books and now tracks all outstanding payments online. This helps keep an eye on which customers have outstanding payments without having to sift through heaps of pages. It also ensures that the company doesn’t rent out more equipment to such customers.
The future with EZRentOut
As the company continues its digitization journey, Liew sees Kheng Sun benefitting from more EZRentOut features in the future. She foresees using the rental software to better forecast inventory and increase equipment availability with the maintenance module, confident that the company will continue delivering the same timely support as it does now.
“We decided to go for EZRentOut hugely because of the customer service. [They] gave us all the support that we needed!”
