Mergers and acquisitions are prevalent in the rental business. According to RER Magazine, there have been 17 notable acquisitions already in 2017. One area to address is integrating the new business with your existing rental software. They may be on a different rental software, and even if you are lucky enough to use the same software, you are likely using it differently.
The first step is determining if you must migrate everything to one system, else let the new company go about business as usual and perhaps just feed over key financial information. Assuming you want to migrate everything to one system, where do you begin?
The smoothest migrations we see are with businesses that assign a cross-functional team committee. Each department in a company has different needs they want to be addressed when switching to new software and each should have complete buy-in on the software they’ll be converting to. A cross-functional committee will allow you, as a company, to decide how your software should be implemented. This committee should be comprised of key personnel from each department who can assist in decisions on software functionality.
Companies need to audit what objects and transactions they need to migrate. We commonly see the following objects and transactions require migration:
- Customer details
- Account receivables
- Vendor information
- Parts and merchandise
- Serialized equipment
- Bulk equipment
- Open contracts
- Open purchase orders
- Open work orders
- Open vendor invoices
But what else does the new company track? Are their specialty areas that need to be included that you do not track today? Maybe the equipment they rent requires an operator which you do not track today. There might also be different maintenance requirements, taxes or depreciation for new cat classes of equipment that need to be added.
Proper planning and pre-work are critical to making sure you have a successful migration.
