As your hire business grows, investing in the latest tools and technology to meet the rising demands of growing audiences becomes essential.
For tool hire businesses, this means investing in the best hire software that can take over your operations effectively—meeting your functionality needs, managing your assets, and providing business insights to improve your efficiency.
As a hire business stakeholder, the following are some of the questions you need to ask to find the ideal solutions that meet these needs:
1. Does the software meet the operational needs of your business?
What meets your operational needs the best, a bespoke solution or a commercial software solution?
The advantage of a bespoke solution is that it will be developed especially for your company and may have the exact tools you require.
While you may not always get advanced functionality with a specialist solution, it comes with a much shorter start-up time at a significantly reduced cost.
Additionally, since you don’t actually own a specialist system, it’ll always be developed, maintained, updated, and supported by the provider and have industry best practices integrated.
If unsure, consult a specialised hire solutions partner before proceeding with this step. Expert guidance will help you review your hire needs, define what processes need automation and digitalisation, and identify how to integrate your new system seamlessly with existing systems.
2. Does the software solution provide business insights?
The best hire solution shouldn't just be a tool that only meets the demands of physical labour.
In today’s competitive market, having the necessary data to make the right decisions can keep your hire business from making hasty decisions and help navigate trends smoothly. Your hire software should have reporting capabilities that shed light on your current performance, track customer behaviour, and predict market trends.
Take, for example, a reporting and analytics feature integrated into your tool hire software. It helps you make records of your business performance, share cohesive information with the relevant stakeholders, and make sense of the business data you collect.
With reports of real-time business intelligence, you can confidently make future-proof decisions that prepare your hire business for the ups and downs of the landscape.
By gaining deep insight into your valuable rental management data, you can also analyse your strengths and weaknesses, and make more informed strategic decisions to improve your performance.
In other words, your rental management software should help you become smarter and more intelligent with your operations and provide all of the teams in your organisation with information that can be leveraged to make better business decisions.
3. Does the software help you with resource utilisation and inventory management?
As your business expands, you need a tool that ensures the optimal usage of your resources.
Your new software solution should cater to this requirement by storing your asset lifetime history in one place and inspecting your inventory in due time to avoid pitfalls like deadstock or double-booking.
Additionally, ask if your hire solution helps you manage resources across your business, including your team.
Being able to define your employees and their job roles and assigning new jobs based on their skills and expertise help you improve the operational efficiency of your hire business.
This means features like resource scheduling, team communication tools like mobile apps, and trend forecasting should be a vital part of a good software solution.
4. Does the software improve the efficiency of your business?
It’s vital that you make sure your software solution is worth the investment and can provide you with a cost-effective solution to manage your processes.
Does your software automate routine tasks and eliminate the need to recruit more staff?
Does it track your assets effectively, schedule asset servicing, and provide reminders of routine checks so you can save on lost assets, safety complaints, and lost customers?
By keeping track of the location and condition of your hire assets automatically, you can make sure they’re always available for hire when you need them, ensuring maximum usage of your assets.
Choose hire software that accelerates your business goals
At the end of the day, what ensures the continuity and success of your business is your profitability.
This should be the goal of your new hire software solution. By making your workforce and business process the most productive they can be, hiring software paves the way for this profitability.