ForConstructionPros.com

Wouldn't it be great to find a gold mine buried beneath your rental business? Well, look no further because you're sitting on top of one right now. Not literally, of course, but in the form of data that can be mined from your operational system.

We talked with four leading software suppliers to the rental industry and asked them what benefits rental businesses could gain from "drilling down" into their data. Following is a question and answer roundtable with Nigel Miller, president and CEO of Texada Software Inc.; Jack Shea, CEO of Solutions by Computer; Bob Shaffer, president of Point-of-Rental Systems; and Michael Stilwagner, vice president of operations at Wynne Systems Inc.

Q: How can data be extracted from a rental company's management software to give it an edge over its competition?
A: Nigel Miller, Texada - The data collected in your operational system is a gold mine of information. When analyzed, it can provide you insight from the most basic analytics to the more complex ones. These analytics can confirm your assessments and provide deeper insight into your business.

Analytics can take the form of comparison of rentals or sales year over year. The competitive edge that a company doing analytics over another is they can predict and even modify the rental cycle by promoting or offering bundling to increase their revenue. You can track how much you are spending on repairs and reduce your overhead based on the analysis of your data. You can track your business in metrics not available before.