How Connected Assets Takes Rental Inventory Management to the Next Level

Faith Kubicki

Managing your rental inventory is a constant, ongoing process. With assets coming in and out every single day – often across multiple locations – it’s a tough job. Rental inventory software can go a long way in helping you track your parts, merchandise, and equipment, but as most of us know all too well – there are still opportunities for items to slip through the cracks. Perhaps a customer requested a pickup and your dispatch team has yet to add the equipment to an upcoming route – even though the machine has been sitting idle at the jobsite for a week now. Or perhaps a new employee forgot to follow proper procedure for transferring an asset between locations and you can’t find it in your yard, even though your records say it’s there. These are just a few of the scenarios where Connected Assets can help you take rental inventory management to the next level.

Connected Assets for Rental Inventory Management: Real-World Examples Where Enhanced Tracking Saves the Day

It's best to think of Connected Assets as an extension of your equipment telematics program, but layered over your rental data for more powerful insights. You don’t just get a dot on a map for a machine’s location; you can easily see which asset it is, which customer it’s currently rented out to, what their contract details specify as far as usage and return dates, what maintenance might be required before you can return it to your rent-ready inventory, and if it has any upcoming reservations. Most importantly, you don’t have to manually hunt down that data for each individual SKU; data visualization lets you see any and all items that meet specific criteria. 

For instance, here’s a look at how Connected Assets can help you pull up a map with all serialized equipment that’s sitting in pickup status:

You can recover your equipment faster and more efficiently, getting it from “return requested” to “rent-ready” with less manual effort. If the contractor has transferred it to another jobsite without letting you know, you don’t want to waste a trip to the wrong location to retrieve it. Similarly, you don’t have to drive around large jobsites looking for the right machine when you can pull its exact coordinates up on a map. Your dispatchers and drivers get a much easier approach to rental inventory tracking.

Connected Assets also lets your Rental Coordinators quickly locate equipment that’s about to go out on contract without having to manually search the yard to hunt it down. You can find any machine’s real-time location and give your yard team precise retrieval instructions. It’s an easy way to get equipment out the door more quickly, with less guesswork:

There’s also the benefit of making sure every single item that a customer rented out – even small non-powered attachments that are easy to overlook – gets picked up on the first run.  No more wasting time (and money!) sending a truck back out to a jobsite just to retrieve a single item. This alone can considerably reduce the operational costs of rental inventory management.

Additionally, you can proactively prepare for any maintenance you need to do in between rentals.

Knowing where your inventory is located is just one piece of the puzzle. You need to be thinking about how you can quickly – yet safely – turn that equipment to the next customer. Connected Assets lets you spot machines that are due for service and past due for service so you can plan accordingly. You don’t have to wait until you’ve received the asset back into your inventory to get the required maintenance on the schedule; you can proactively open the corresponding work orders so you can get the equipment back into your rent-ready fleet.

Discover Connected Assets for Streamlined Rental Inventory Management

Want to see how Connected Assets can help you more strategically manage your rental inventory? Contact us today for a full free demo of InTempo MX.