RER caught up with Lauren Dorman, vice president of product development for RMI Corp., Avon, Conn., and talked about mobile functionality, putting automation and control in the hands of users, business intelligence reporting and more.
RER: Is strengthening the mobile functionality an important current emphasis? What are your company’s capabilities and strengths in that area?
Dorman: Our initial launch of the Advantage mobile platform occurred in 2011. We worked very closely with a number of our large customers and focused primarily on managing equipment within the warehouse, rental staging and rental returns. While the platform has always been device independent (meaning we don’t require specific devices or manufacturers), most of those early adopters chose to use hand-held scanners during those initial projects.
Since that time, our mobile platform has expanded and we’re finding the highest adoption rate and successes in the areas of warehouse management, rental and sale deliveries, rental returns, inspections and service work performed by technicians. This makes sense since these tend to be the road warriors of the business. Today, our mobile platform is being utilized on tablets, all makes and models of scanners and smart phones. Our mobile platform also supports other areas of business, such as rental and sales quoting, contact management and Inventory / Fleet inquiries. While we can and do support these areas, the staff performing these duties generally requires a much more robust experience than mobile platforms deliver. More often, we find that our customers are simply using our full Advantage solution remotely on a laptop or tablet since they are more conducive to data entry and better suits their needs. Advantage is cloud based, so our customers really can and do work from anywhere.
What are some of the advancements your customers are calling for that you’re working on?
Let’s face it – this can be a complicated industry. Sure we rent equipment but what might seem so simple to an outsider is really a very sophisticated business. There are so many interconnected cogs that drive the business – anything we can do to keep them running smoothly and effortlessly gives the business a real advantage in a competitive marketplace.
On the “effortless” front, our current projects are all about a “proactive” approach to business. This actually spans several overall user experience enhancements. One such area is color coding work queues and dashboard KPI’s to alert users when certain business situations fall below expected results. This helps staff stay on top of their responsibilities. We’re also putting more automation and control into the hands of the user, especially around reporting. Two major changes we’re rolling out are the ability to schedule day-to-day reports and selecting the customer’s format of choice: PDF, Excel or Word. I say “day-to-day” reports because we’ve already automated many KPI and Dashboard reports, but this improvement puts real control into the hands of the user. Scheduling reports is going to be a huge time saver, especially when it’s a data intensive report that will be executed in the background.
The next major release of Advantage will also bring an even tighter integration to Microsoft technologies and more device independence. On the Microsoft side, our customers will experience improved integration with the Office 365 suite, including Word, Excel, and SharePoint. Presentation, analytics and document storage becomes easier and more transparent with this integration. Accessing the Advantage solution via computers, laptops and tablets with (optional) touch screen support will be available via the browser of the customer’s choice. So use your laptop in the office and your Mac from the house. We’re aiming for “optimized, on demand, your way” with the next release.
What about payment by smartphone, how is that capability progressing?
Technologically, it’s possible to swipe and securely capture credit cards. We’ve been able to do this for a number of years. However, our customers are in the B2B marketspace. In this arena, orders are placed over the phone and credit card information is directly entered into Advantage at the time the order is taken. Since charges may only be incurred at time of equipment delivery, our customers often initiate an address verification to confirm the validity of a new card. It’s really a “card not present” situation.
Are customers concerned about the safety of their data, protection against hacking or other invasions of privacy and information theft? What is your company doing to protect your customers?
Who isn’t these day? Recent events at large retailers, health insurance companies and government agencies just go to show that securing your business data is critical no matter your size or industry. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t had a scare in some shape or form. When I think of potential hackers and data security – two topics come to mind: highly secured environments and credit card numbers.
When mapping out our cloud strategy in 2006, security was first and foremost on our minds. We knew we required a secure and redundant environment, in addition to rolling out security best practices that can sometimes be overlooked when you’re hosting your business systems within your four walls. The Advantage Cloud is hosted in a SSAE 16 environment that is audited to ensure security protocols and procedures are followed according to the certification. The data centers meet Tier III platform requirements, with redundant power systems, fiber routes and layered physical security protocols to protect against the human threat. The environment includes multiple and redundant firewalls with encrypted communications between the user and the environment. We’re also enforcing User password best practices such as password expirations, minimum reuse and password security levels. This state of the art security just isn’t feasible when a small to mid-sized business houses the business system internally.
While no one facility can be 100 percent guaranteed to be secure against any and all attacks (consider recent identity protection companies who thought they were impenetrable), this is a critical concern for all businesses and one that we take seriously.
Many of our clients accept credit cards for one time transaction and recurring payments. Advantage includes fully integrated, PCI compliant credit card features within our secure environment to protect our customers as well as their customers. All cards are secured and masked via 192 bit 3DES strong cryptography and encryption, along with support for Purchase Card level information to help our customers be secure while gaining better card rates.
How important is it to be able to integrate with other types of software, for example, integration with SmartEquip and other software-related service providers?
Try as you might, it’s not possible to be all things to everyone. Each software vendor has developed their own expertise in a given area. A truly forward looking business is going to want to leverage “best of breed” tools to help them grow their business, so it just makes sense to support integration with those solutions. RMI offers integration to other 3rd party solutions via Web Services, which is a secure, powerful method of sharing data between systems. These are real time connections to Advantage so that we are able to ensure the data passed works within the parameters of the business system logic. This helps eliminate garbage in / garbage out and gives us consistent and accurate results.
How can your software help a rental company better analyze its cost structure and determine which equipment is profitable and which isn’t? How can your software help a rental company determine at what point a piece of equipment becomes unprofitable and should be sold?
Business Intelligence reporting is key to ascertaining which product lines – and which individual units – are ready for retirement. The key to these measures is to bring trending into the evaluation. And this isn’t just on individual equipment – you need to evaluate trends in rental rates and durations by class of equipment. There are quite a few data elements which need to be captured over time and brought into the equation.
Advantage is a fully integrated solution – with Rental and Sales Order management fully integrated with Fleet maintenance, which is integrated with Service Management. When you’re able to collect all of the details from equipment acquisition cost, planned maintenance & repair costs, through to revenue earned and contract durations – you’re able to pull some pretty sophisticated numbers.
RMI has invested a great deal in the reporting / business intelligence area of our solution. We also recently introduced our Reporting Guarantee – if Advantage does not already offer a standard report that delivers the information you require – we will build one for free. This program has been embraced by our customers. Not only are they able to get information in a format that means something to them – RMI is able to develop out our standard report offering as a benefit to all our clients. In this industry, we all learn from each other – be it an association, a customer, vendor or a similar industry - it’s the sharing of those ideas and views that help guide greater awareness and knowledge. It’s a pretty exciting place to be.
How about fleet inspections and diagnostics/interface with telematics systems, what is your functionality in this arena?
Keeping your equipment up and running is not only a matter of good business sense via keeping customers satisfied and driving revenue, sometimes it’s also a matter of safety and regulatory requirements. As with anything you attempt to automate, it’s got to be easy to do and walk the user through a logical process that makes the most sense based on equipment type and situation. Advantage began supporting equipment inspections via our mobile platform in 2012. Our base inspection process is more of a framework whereby we track steps based on equipment type and the automation of Service Work Orders to address the failures once the inspection is completed. When we implement inspection processes with customers, we automate their physical inspections steps and roll that out to their staff. This approach allows us to quickly and easily release the proper workflows to our customers within minimal effort.
Inspection records are stored for historical reference purposes while the Service Work Order is used to execute any repair or maintenance items. This full integration from off rent to inspections to service work order allows us to capture details completely through the lifecycle of each item of fleet inventory as well as Property, Plant and Equipment assets.
