In the competitive rental market, staying ahead of the curve is vital, and digitalisation is key to improving service efficiency and enhancing customer satisfaction. Soon, hire companies that continue to operate with obsolete technologies or outdated and inefficient processes will be left behind. Through digitalisation, rental businesses can improve performance, create new revenue opportunities, improve singular business processes, and transform their whole rental operation.
What is digitalisation?
The key to digitalisation, is understanding its true meaning. Going digital from an analogue format can be the first step towards achieving digitalisation, but it’s about going one step further than just removing paper-based processes or using spreadsheets…
Digitalisation takes a fresh approach and looks at your whole customer rental journey from beginning to end. By analysing your internal business processes as a whole, including how departments interact with each other and your touchpoints with your customers, you can identify where bottlenecks and inefficiencies lie and where you are wasting money and your valuable human resources.
For many, digitalisation means bringing together all your rental processes into one integrated digital system. With a sophisticated all-in-one rental management solution, you can improve internal communication and collaboration and take advantage of powerful data and automated processes to make your rental operation run like a dream.
What are the most common areas that rental companies target in their digital transformation?
Many rental companies will have identified the areas of weakness they wish to address. Some of the most common pains in the industry that are driving digitalisation include:
- Fragmented systems – Reducing the use of multiple systems in your business means less duplication of data and workloads, better communication between your teams and shorter lead times. With an all-in-one system, you can consolidate your various processes saving you time, stress and money.
- Legacy systems – Using outdated legacy systems that are no longer supported or being developed will hold you back and prevent your plans for future growth. Adopting a future-proof software partner that can support and grow with your business over time will be key to securing your future success.
- Lack of reliable data – Without easy-to-access, relevant data, you will find it difficult to make business decisions that are based on key statistics. With modern, visual business intelligence and reporting, you can take insights from all areas of your business, adapt quickly to changing market trends and react before your competition does.
- Over reliance on paper and manual processes – When businesses reach a certain size, paper-based manual processes simply aren’t sustainable and makes each job take longer to complete than it should. Going fully digital, saves you space and time but also improves your professional image by leaving behind the dog-eared hand written forms or notes. A change to digital also enables your team to work on the move and from any location without always needing to stop off back at the office.
What challenges do hirers face when it comes to digitalisation?
One of the biggest barriers that rental businesses quickly come across is the deeply embedded ‘way of doing things’, where employees fear change and so there is an initial resistance of working differently. There can be a fear that if it means work can be done more efficiently and in less time, what will happen to their role?
Be open and honest with your team, discussing the goals and the eventual outcomes and get their thoughts and opinions of how to improve. Having a clear plan, structure and reasoning for why you’re changing the way you do business, and then explaining what the future looks like, you’ll quickly get the backing and support from your teams.
What should you consider when it comes to your digitalisation journey?
Your digitalisation journey needs to be planned carefully with goals and outcomes agreed at each stage. The better the plan, the smoother the transition. One of the best ways to achieve success, is to choose a good partner that you can trust with the expertise, industry knowledge and that can help you plan your roadmap.
Partnering with a technology provider aligned to your industry gives you all the tools you need to digitalise every area of your business. With the freedom to scale up, or down, you can rest assured that your technology will never restrict your plans for the future.
Don’t try and do it alone. With the right resources and expertise, you’ll be able to create a strong roadmap to digitalise your business efficiently and with minimal disruption.
Who are MCS and what can they offer to help hirers digitalise?
MCS has worked with rental and asset management businesses for more than 35 years, providing software solutions that enable growth. Certainly since the Covid pandemic, the demand for going ‘digital’ has accelerated. Businesses across the world have looked to new ways of working and collaborating using new platforms, solutions and software. This has also led to business leaders asking themselves, ‘how can we make these digital solutions work better for us?’ or ‘What can we do take our digital journey one step further?’.
MCS Rental Software offers cloud, web and mobile products that work together in an all-in-one solution that gives your business the power to work more efficiently, increase profitability and work smarter. With experts and account managers to help your business along the way on its route to digitalisation, you can trust MCS to help you achieve your goals.
As working smarter becomes second nature, efficiencies soar and profitability increases, if you don’t digitalise, you won’t survive, and that is a real catalyst in the industry today.