James Morley, senior vice president of global product management, Point of Rental Software, talks about POR’s Rental Intelligence suite, integration with telematics and RFID, long-term trend analysis and more.
RER: What is new in your software and technology?
Morley: We’re partnering with our customers to deliver smart, transformative tools that deliver business intelligence, automation, and customer self-service.
This year, we’ve rolled out the first features of our Rental Intelligence (RI) suite:
● Product Detail Supercharger takes your make/model input and turns it into a fully-formed product page in your software and on your website, so customers can better understand which items they want to rent. Soon, that will evolve into Product Supercharger, which identifies ways to drive more revenue from existing inventory, offering insights like bundled package suggestions.
● We’ve trained a help chatbot on our extensive product documentation, so it can walk users through processes and answer questions quickly, all within the platform.
● It’s all getting built on our dynamic, real-time analytics and recommendations engine that’s set up to proactively highlight missed revenue opportunities, flag anomalies, and identify underutilized inventory.
We’ve also added a lot of integration functionality, partnering with bidadoo, Samsara, Hapn, and more, because there are a lot of valuable tools out there for rental businesses, and they need it to work with their rental software.
How does your software help customers to manage costs?
Point of Rental covers all aspects of our customers’ business and provides detailed cost tracking at every stage - from acquisition to disposal of assets. We allow rental businesses to monitor asset utilization, idle time, maintenance costs, and cost recovery. This leads to better capital planning and quicker decisions about equipment lifecycle management.
How does your software help keep track of customers’ rentals?
Customers and their contracts are centralized within Point of Rental. Alerts notify staff of upcoming returns, overdue items, or expiring contracts. Customers are even able to see their own contracts and contract history, make payments, and more through our Consumer Portal.
Integration with telematics and RFID shows real-time equipment status and inventory location; this level of trackability is on our roadmap for Consumer Portal as well.
How does your software keep track of missed rentals with particular customers?
Missed rentals reports help flag patterns and give you the opportunity to re-engage customers with the right availability or promotional offers, enhancing conversion and retention.
How does your software help to maintain rental rates at a profitable rental?
We’ve integrated with tools like Rouse to monitor competitor benchmarks, seasonal demand, and asset scarcity to suggest price adjustments. Profit margin overlays help ensure rates remain viable even after discounts, freight, or servicing.
Manage the various costs of the rental at check-in, and manage and facilitate the check-in process?
Using our mobile apps at check-in, users can log damage, fuel levels, hours of use, and late fees. Automated workflows calculate penalties and trigger follow-ups (e.g., maintenance requests or billing disputes). This reduces leakage and speeds up turnaround.
Record360, an inspection app that we acquired last year, allows customers to quickly note damage that has occurred and facilitate the recovery of that damage cost, even if they’re not using a Point of Rental RMS.
Manage transportation, that is manage the vehicles and manage the fleet?
Point of Rental integrates fleet dispatching with contract management. It includes load planning, driver assignment, real-time GPS tracking, and vehicle maintenance schedules—ensuring both equipment and delivery assets are optimized.
Routing the daily deliveries and pick-ups?
Dispatch Center (Centre, if you’re Canadian) maps routes automatically based on proximity, traffic, and delivery time windows. It minimizes fuel costs and labor inefficiencies. Drivers use our mobile app to update progress, capture signatures, and flag delivery issues.
Tell us about your telematics capabilities and its ability to analyze potential long-term trends.
Point of Rental supports telematics integrations with a variety of tools. Features include:
● Live tracking of machine location, usage hours, and engine diagnostics.
● Predictive maintenance by flagging unusual behavior patterns or engine codes.
● Automated check-ins/check-outs when equipment enters or exits geofenced job sites.
● Long-term trend analysis across fleets to inform capital purchases, pricing, and service planning.
These integrations help reduce breakdowns, improve asset ROI, and enhance customer trust through proactive communication.
What is AI doing for your software and what capabilities might be on the horizon for AI?
AI is already driving significant advancements in our platform. Through Rental Intelligence (RI) and our help chatbot, AI enables more relevant recommendations, real-time anomaly detection, and intuitive guidance for users. All of this helps businesses recover missed revenue, streamline operations, and onboard staff faster.
Looking ahead, we’re investing heavily in an AI-powered data platform. As the largest provider of rental software globally, we’ve always known the value that aggregated, benchmarked insights could offer our customers. But one major roadblock has been taxonomy fragmentation: every business structures and labels its data differently, making standardization difficult at scale.
AI is the game changer. It allows us to harmonize disparate data models, effectively solve the taxonomy challenge, and deliver powerful, tailored business intelligence across our customer base. This means rental companies — regardless of size or system configuration — can access actionable insights about their performance, compare benchmarks across industries or regions, and identify trends and inefficiencies that were previously hidden.
In the near future, we see AI extending into:
● Natural language contracts and reporting, reducing administrative overhead.
● Predictive customer behavior models, including churn risk and upsell opportunities.
● Intelligent automation, where AI recommends or executes next-best actions across the rental workflow.
Ultimately, our goal is to use AI not just to enhance Point of Rental’s software, but to elevate the entire rental industry’s intelligence and agility.
How about e-commerce? How is this capability growing and evolving?
Digital experiences are a growing demand across B2B and B2C renters. We’ve invested heavily in allowing our users to maximize their revenue without increasing their personnel overhead by delivering:
● Online bookings with live availability data.
● Automated payments and contract delivery.
● Customer portals for service history, live tracking, and invoice downloads.
Additionally, Point of Rental supports tiered pricing and promo logic online, enabling upsells or dynamic rates based on customer profiles or usage behavior. For example, if you’ve got a customer who gets a 10-percent discount, when they’re logged in on your storefront, they’ll see a $100 rental marked at $90.
What are some of the capabilities forward-thinking customers might be asking for or thinking about?
We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how rental businesses think about value: the focus is moving away from simply renting equipment and toward delivering outcomes.
Forward-thinking companies are no longer asking “How do I get this machine to the customer?” They’re asking, “How do I help the customer complete their job faster, more safely, and more cost-effectively?”
That mindset opens the door to a range of new technologies and service models. It could mean smarter recommendation engines that suggest the right equipment based on the project type, not just what the customer searches for. It could mean integrated operator marketplaces, job planning tools, or bundled services that package delivery, setup, and removal into a seamless experience.
At the same time, customer experience is becoming the key differentiator between rental businesses. As core rental equipment becomes more commoditized, the winners will be those who deliver the most frictionless, intuitive, and reliable service. That includes everything from mobile self-service portals and real-time order tracking to predictive communication (“Here’s what you’ll need next week based on your job phase”) and fully automated logistics coordination.
The rental industry of the future won’t be defined by who owns the most equipment; it will be defined by who understands their customers best, and who can remove the most obstacles between intention and execution. Technology is what makes that possible, but the real innovation lies in rethinking what rental can be.
Any other new trends you’d like to discuss?
Customers worldwide are increasingly requesting end-to-end digitalization, real time transparency, and business intelligence that not only tracks, but anticipates operational needs. We also see a lot of demand for tools like self-service kiosks, app-based workflows based on completing tasks, and even sustainability tracking for carbon emissions per rental.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.