If your rental business is based on complex equipment that requires more than simply unloading and loading from your delivery trucks, you may well need to consider how you manage installation and takedown services within your rental contract management software.
Many of our customers provide more than just equipment. They deliver full solutions to their customers, which might include installing a pumping line, providing project management services and maintenance or inspection of services. For this type of business the rental contract is not just about the period of rental, it’s also about what happens before the rental charges start and what happens after they finish. If this sounds familiar, here are just a few examples of how Wynne can help deliver additional support to your rental process.
Determining Service Requirements
Your rental contract may include labor as well as equipment. These can be tied to specific assets (e.g., if you are providing technical support on the installation of a large generator) or they can be generic to the contract if you are providing general installation services for 20 generators.
Labor can also be tied to specific roles. you can specify that you need four hours of project manager time, eight hours electrical technician time, and one hour a day for seven days for a support technician if you wanted to do so. Once demand is specified on the contract, then you can manage the allocation of labor through the labor allocation screens, allowing you to plan and manage your people availability in exactly the same way as you would your equipment allocations.
Project, Task Based Charging and Time Cards
Everything you put on your rental contract can be allocated to project and task codes. Whether these represent your own internal task codes for the different phases of a project, or your customer is asking you to bill by their task codes may well vary from business to business. Either way, Wynne will support you.
You can post timecards or timesheets for each of the people involved in the contract. When you post a timesheet you can post it against a rental line of the contract, against the person involved, and if you wish against a project or task code. However you look at your business from an analysis point of view, the system will support the data capture to allow you to make informed business decisions.
Managing the Logistics Process
When it comes to putting your contract together there are many processes that have to be staged to complete a complex rental with professional services requirements. You may deliver equipment several days or even weeks before the actual rental charges begin. You may want to stagger the delivery of equipment so that each phase of an installation is completed in waves as and when the technicians are ready for the next set of equipment.
All of these things are possible within Wynne’s software: you can create multiple mobilizations against a single contract, each with its own delivery dates and times, and specify for each element when rental charges should begin. This will not affect your availability of rental equipment; the system understands that certain assets have been delivered to the job site and they cannot be used anywhere else even though they haven’t yet started their rental charging. The system will keep track of uncharged rental days – effectively, utilization during the delivery phase or the takedown phase separated from the actual rental period.
Equipment Operators
If your contracts include machine operators (crane drivers, grader operators etc.), then you can build specific operated equipment rules into your equipment management, and change normal day/week/month type billing for hourly-based charges with overtime rates, travel time and other components. Contract lines recognized as operated equipment are specifically billed via time cards to allow you to manage these types of contracts differently, but they can be combined into normal rental contracts if you wish.
Whatever your business requirements, Wynne is designed to support the most complex of project or service based transactions around your rental process. For more information or to arrange a demonstration, please contact us today.
Written by Helen Sowerby
