We just finished talking about key performance indicators that you need to be aware of as a rental manager, and I'd like to illustrate for you something that I think is really invaluable. And what you're looking at is a set of data tables that have been organized together so that you can actually do some very comprehensive analysis. And so what you're looking at is information about the salesman and their activity and their customers. You're looking at your market segments, customer types, and really what we want to see is whether these customers are really doing business across the enterprise. So I want to see if they are a parts customer, whether they're buying equipment. So you see the equipment sales, and you see the rental activity, and you see the service activity, and then you see the name of the customer. And so this stuff can be brought together even if it's external of your computer system in a pivot table because most of the time your data is in different places. And so your customer data, your salesman's transaction data, your market segment data, your parts sales service, those types of things are usually in probably at least three different data tables. And so what I'm suggesting to you is I believe you should find someone in your organization or even hire an outside consultant to come in and set up a pivot table for you that has an ongoing link, and you as the rental manager will now have trending information available at your fingertip to be able to see how your categories of products are doing. You're going to see what customers are using your entire services at the dealership. So anyway, data is really, really important to help make decisions, and I encourage you to try to be as sophisticated as possible, but do not spend all your time trying to run a lot of manual reports. This is something that you get set up one time. It has a link, and you hit a refresh button, and the information just keeps coming. It'll be very well worth the time and effort to put it together. So to look at a few of the other things that we talked about would be revenues by key markets. And so I'm looking at a trend line here about where's the revenues coming from by key market segments. Okay, so that's looking at you'd see some seasonality there, and in this particular example you're seeing that highway contractors were doing better. I mean, we were $300,000 approximately 13 months ago, and now we are up almost to $500,000. The other category is we really haven't made much progress. We're not necessarily losing a lot, but the highway equipment, I would start to look and say, what else is it that I can have products that'll fill that market? Another one is the active customers. So if you look at this and compare it to the last slide we just looked at, this makes sense, because it suggests that I used to have 25 or 24 highway contractors doing business with me, and now I'm probably about 45. So my revenues have grown, if you recall from the last slide. My customer base for site developers has gone up some, but not significant. And same way with general contractors. So I'm trying to see on any given month what the activity level is by the actual contractors in that group. Then I'm also measuring market demand. Some of you have seen this type of thing before. Hopefully you have it at your counter. But basically we need to be recording missed sales, and whether you've got this electronic on your screen or whether you've got a ledger pad, I actually recommend the pad because typically people are faster at writing something down than they are keying it. But the idea here is to record all the calls according to the date, who was it that called this, the company that called, where are they calling from, and what is it that they were looking for. You could actually have this at your front desk. Rental Sales Service Parts Administration, you could use this anywhere in your building. Your outside salesman can use this. You can indicate what it was they were trying to rent, the prices that we quoted them, and then if we had to say no, why did we have to say no? And you can indicate that we don't stock it, we don't have the right price, it's out on rent, or ours was broken down. So this is one of the ways to quantify missed rental opportunities, and you really need to put dollars and cents to it. This is not an academic exercise. It's actually something that we're looking and saying, I turned down a three-week wheel loader rental because we didn't have any available. So three weeks worth of wheel loader rental equals how many dollars? I need to include how many dollars that I just said no to. And then as a rental manager, you need to be reviewing this document at your rental counter all the time to kind of see what is it that we're saying no to and which customers are we saying no to, because you may decide to make a different decision to be able to salvage some of the business. A few of the other reports you need to be looking at to monitor what's going on, the top left-hand corner here you can see the fleet out on rent. So in this particular example, we've got a rental fleet that's worth roughly about $10 million, and it looks like we're keeping somewhere between the high $6 million and almost $7 million out on rent. But what that does is show you a trend line as to whether your fleet is staying pretty active or it's in decline or it's increasing. And then financial utilization, you can start to see what's going on one year versus another year and how we're trending. A couple others, transaction data. So open contracts, you can see that on a week-by-week basis and compare it to the same time period last year. Data, in my opinion, to be relative, it needs to be compared to something. A particular, well, let's just take the blue line this year, open contracts. If I just looked at 54, 68, 70, 72, I really don't know if that's good or bad because it's not compared to anything. So I need to have additional data points when I'm doing analysis because that helps give me a backdrop of whether we're doing better than we were a year ago, for instance. Then if I look at my chart next to that, you might look at average invoices. And so that starts to show you that in June, July, and August, my invoice values were getting higher, which is a good indicator. And then it has dropped significantly. In the wintertime, my invoice values are about $1,600 versus about $2,600, $1,000 difference per invoice in the slower winter months. A few other additional monitoring reports that you might want to consider is I believe you should use exception reporting, meaning that you set some criteria, and anything that doesn't meet that criteria, that's the one you want to know about. I really don't believe you should run 30 pages of reports and have to pore over that to try to find the needle in the haystack. So, for instance, one of the things you might want to know are any of your machines that have produced less than 25% financialization for the trailing 12 months. Why would that be important? Well, that potentially is dragging your rental fleet performance down, and you will need to figure out what you can do about it. You also might want to know any of the machines that have not rented in the last 60 days. Additionally, you probably want to know about your best performing groups. Which are those category classes of equipment that are really working for you? Which ones have the best timeout utilization? You need to review that and see if it seems to make sense. You need to find the ones that have the best financialization. You might want to continue to invest in those machines. And then the flip side of that is you want to look at the lowest performing asset groups, and you want to figure out what's wrong with those. So, exception reporting, I think, is a key piece of being an effective rental manager so that you spend your time wisely and your system is giving you information you can really take action on.

key performance indicators

data analysis

rental management

pivot tables

revenues by market segments