So what can a fleet manager expect when dealing with a rental intermediary?

Traditionally, the business of short-term rental management has been people hungry with a high level of manual intervention required.

Companies in our sector have a wide variety of customer contacts and suppliers to deal with every day, often numerous times each – whether it be to negotiate rental supply, monitor performance, ensure driver policies are being adhered to, check invoices or complete payments.

More often than not, each customer or supplier requires different processes and documentation, which involves enormous levels of re-keying of data. This puts considerable cost into the process and creates the opportunity for error and inefficiency.

All of this has historically made daily rental a very costly market in which to operate, although with the economic pressures we are currently facing there is high expectation of rates being kept low.

For some fleet managers, the solution to this problem was to reduce the number of providers used. But this then limited the scope of the service, tying the organisation – and its customer – to a small number of rental companies and potentially putting the fleet manager at a disadvantage.

They were not necessarily offering the best choice, nor were they adding true value to the service provided to their customers.

There needed to be a different solution. One that could tackle the inherent costs and inefficiencies of established methods of daily rental management while also adding value to the service proposition particularly for contract hire and leasing companies serving fleet customers. That’s where organisations like Nexus fit in.

The ideal solution, as anyone in the contract hire, leasing and daily rental industry would agree, is a single rental management system that supports multiple supplier propositions, with a free, secure and easy-to-use process handling all aspects of rental management, regardless of which rental supplier was chosen on any given day, for any individual reservation.

And it needs to be completely supplier-independent, delivered over the web to avoid the need for proprietary hardware or software and to facilitate real-time accessibility.

Nexus delivers this solution through our IRIS rental management system.

And I believe it is vital that fleet managers dealing with large volumes of daily rental, as well as small and medium-sized businesses using rental for their own requirements, look for the sort of management and information advantages we deliver through IRIS whichever supplier they choose.

The system should be web-based and able to handle an unlimited number of users and suppliers and rental reservations on any day.

Ideally it should be created by rental management experts who have hands-on knowledge of every aspect of the rental management process, rather than IT providers.

A good rental management system should also be completely limitless in its flexibility to integrate with the operational requirements of both customers and suppliers and all functionality should operate in real-time.

To facilitate a ‘best in market’ fleet management process, fleet managers should look for these key functions from their rental provider:

• Web-driven access routes for reservations
• In-life rental management
• Post-rental billing
• Comprehensive online real-time reporting
• Supplier quality management

The more of this functionality that can be achieved without any human interface, once the initial set-up has been completed, the better. We operate on the basis that the number of touch points should be kept to the absolute minimum – if an individual needs to ‘touch’ the rental proposition the chance of error increases.

Using this sort of integrated solution, a fleet manager should be able to manage the rental process from the initial placing of a reservation to the auditing and production of final charges, while staying in control every step of the way.

They should be able to create pre-set parameters to ensure driver and transport/travel policies are adhered to, as well as create driver profiles and automate line-manager authorisation.

This real-time accessible insight into rental activity should also enable them to eradicate overdue hires and manage damage reporting – both of which are key cost issues that often impact on the profitability of a rental reseller and hit the bottom line of businesses.

Accident and damage claims are a major issue for all organisations involved in daily rental, so a good rental management system must be able to automatically flag up any reservation against which an accident or damage claim has been logged.

This can then be reviewed to assess the damage by vehicle group and driver name and the types of claims made, providing a high level of monitoring of claims made by a particular company and against any particular rental company.

Data from a good rental management system should also streamline the P11D reporting process – a major time-consuming issue for many organisations.

And live, up-to-the-minute management information should put them totally in control of daily rental costs. Crucially, it should also provide overall quality and service management.

You mentioned integration. What did you have in mind?

For fleet and leasing companies and insurers that offer daily rental as an integral facet of their own services, having a fully-integrated system allows them to do business with their customers faster and more efficiently and gives them a more tailored service.

This removes pressure from their own IT department and budgets; it should also enable resellers to create a highly-competitive and improved customer proposition, managing multiple suppliers and products via a single system, while eliminating processes to increase the bottom line across reservations, sales and purchase ledgers.

And detailed management information reports should provide remarketers with qualitative and quantitative data on customer demands and supplier performance to support informed decision-making for future business development.

For end users, it should mean people whose expertise is not daily rental or fleet management don’t have to spend much time on this aspect of their business operations.