RER Innovative Product Award Honorable Mention – Alert Management Systems
Category: Technology Enhancements
Product: Job Costing Module
Manufacturer: Alert Management Systems
Key Innovation: Track profit/loss on individual jobs
Manufacturer’s Description: You know your ROI on your rental equipment, you know your profit margins on your sales, but do you know your profitability on your jobs?
Every great rental operator knows their KPIs, so their rental software should provide them! Instead of only looking at the ROI or time/dollar utilization of your rental fleet, why not also look at the profitability of your jobs as a whole?
Whether you need to use third party haulers, or you have per diem or sub-rental costs, those jobs being quoted need some sort of metric oversight, without creating a bottleneck or adding touch-costs. Don’t do it based on intuition, experience or a ‘gut feeling’ – do it with a set of parameters that make sense for your business and create a recognized and automated process for your organization. This is where Alert’s Job Costing Module comes in! Set parameters for which jobs require job cost worksheets [i.e. over a certain dollar amount], ask your sales staff or logistics people a handful of questions, and quickly and easily estimate the profit margin on your quote (or evaluate jobs after-the-fact for better future estimating or commission purposes).
A dashboard gives you the 10,000-foot view of your orders (quotes or on-going jobs) that require new or updated worksheets, and with easy-to-read color coding it shows the profitability on those jobs. This dashboard gives you the ability to select a series of jobs and provide aggregated data for them as a whole, and also includes quick access hyperlinks to the job costing worksheets themselves with filters for dates, dollar amounts, salesperson, project manager and more!
Video link: https://youtu.be/ZnSuvQ4RiI0
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.