Rental: Rental Inventory Tracking
The tracking of rental inventory can become a real challenge. There is the need to know where every piece of equipment is located by serial number at all times. One needs to know when that piece of equipment is due back and when it is scheduled for its next rental customer. These concerns and much more are address by EXEControl Rental. The following are some of EXEControl’s features that address these needs:
Serialized Inventory
The system tracks the activity and whereabouts of specific serialized units. Each item may optionally be defined as serialized or non-serialized. Quantities for a particular item are tracked in total by location and individually by serial number.
Multiple Locations
EXEControl allows inventory quantities to be maintained in one or many locations. A location can be as broadly defined as an entire branch or as narrowly defined as a specific room or shelf. Individual locations can be grouped together for display purposes to minimize unnecessary detail.
Status Tracking
In addition to the use of locations to track the physical whereabouts of rental inventory, locations can be used to identify the state of “readiness” of rental inventory units. For example, within a particular branch, there may be separate locations defined for statuses of “on rent”, “ready to rent”, “short-term maintenance”, “long-term maintenance”, “being inspected”, “off rent at customer’s site” and “in transit to another branch”. EXEControl systematically tracks the movement of specific rental units between these various statuses. These statuses are user-defined, and may be as general or detailed as desired. Whenever an item is referenced in the inventory status display or within the entry of an order, an informative matrix is presented which shows how many units are in each of these status categories at each branch location.
User-Defined Unit Characteristics
EXEControl provides many ways for each organization to adjust the system to fit its unique requirements. One way that the system supports this is through the use of “dimensions”. Dimensions are user-defined fields whose values can be inputted for each serialized unit. For example, if the item is a “Chevrolet Lumina”, it might have dimensions to record the color, engine size, 2 doors or 4 doors, model year and other options for each specific car. This way, the particulars of each individual unit can be known and utilized for selections and searching.
Before 1990, we ran our business basically by the seat of our pants. We were very much wandering in the dark as to the actual status of our business. We never knew with any precision what we had in inventory or how profitable a contract job was.