At its core, business intelligence is a set of data and indicators that help enterprises to make better and faster decisions, according to Patrice Boivin, president of Orion Software.
“Rental businesses are primarily looking at equipment availability, real-time alerts on maintenance, return on investment, utilization and information on logistics and customer service,” he notes. “The availability of information is presented with graphics that provide multiple dimensions of what affects the equipment to be available. In one quick image, users are able to have a complete understanding of the situation. They can also get a graph of ROI and utilization that provides a view of the equipment performance and the effects of a change in prices on performance.”
Boivin says the best rental applications integrate this information.
“Your vendor should provide its customers with a set of BI tools already build in to improve the decision-making process,” Boivin says. “That’s part of their expertise and they meet with hundreds of companies every year. So, vendors have a broad view of what’s required in the market.”
He continues, “The best BI tools are often integrated into a Web page where users can select which graphs or sets of data they want to view. By encapsulating the BI in one central place, data can be used as performance drivers for the whole company. This way, every manager is aligned to focus on the same objectives. The BI should have a mix of day-to-day indicators and longer-term information to help make purchase and pricing decisions for instance.”
As an ex CFO of large companies, Boivin says he considers the rental market very unique with a special set of indicators.
“We often meet with customers that have very little visibility on their real performance,” he says. “BI is probably more important in rental than in other markets. In the future, as more companies adopt advanced data analytics, BI will be a differentiating factor between performing businesses and the rest.”
