Why You Need to Automate Your Rental Operations for Maximum Efficiency

Karri: Today we are talking about this dreamlike rental business and how you can achieve it. Let's focus on operations and automations.

Tuomo: Yeah, maybe a way of thinking about it from a business use case, business perspective. We've mentioned a few times now in this podcast that every time your inventory is not out with a customer, so it's kind of sitting idly in your inventory, it's not earning. So you really want to minimize that idle time.

And there's different kinds of idle time. There's of course idle time like the fact that there's no bookings coming in. But there's also idle time like something is waiting for maintenance and it's kind of removed from the availability in the way that it's been reserved internally for maintenance. You kind of want to make sure that these events that take an item out of your inventory are as short as possible, of course. And that demands X amount of automation. Because if the whole process is based on pure human perception and kind of being aware that, hey, did we have a few bikes here that we should work on and so on? It can become quite a messy operation.

So you probably want to automate a lot of things. So if we start from a few basic examples, you might want to automate, first of all, the idea that after every 50 rentals, the item needs to go to inspection and possibly maintenance, for example. So that might be super hard for someone to just remember on the spot to do. So it's a process that you probably want to automate. In Twice, these are the things that our workflows enable you to do. So you can create these rules that point to items that after X amount of something, create an internal reservation, for example. Or create a task in the task management for someone to inspect and then possibly mark it into maintenance.

The other aspect that is then in play is that, well, when something is, for example, marked into maintenance, you really want your staff to work through that and not forget them into the maintenance mode. So it's super important that you have visibility into what's in maintenance. That's something that it's relatively easy to see in Twice as in the status of the item. But also, again, task lists that can be targeted to teams or individuals are a very helpful tool here where you can see easily that if there's any tasks undone. So automating not only changes in the items, but also automating the creation of things like tasks can streamline your operation a lot and make things more understandable for everyone in your team.

Karri: Absolutely. And we're maybe already kind of going a little bit onto the next segment, which is kind of data and how you can use that to utilize. But I think this is something that works really well when you actually get those insights, get that data. So, for example, with the maintenance, like after you've been running your, let's say, bike rental shop for a while, you start to see that, hey, on average, things start to break down after X amount of rentals.

So this is something that you want to probably automate that, hey, I know that it usually takes like 25 rentals and then some parts are becoming too loose or something like that. And you want to kind of create a task like after 20 rentals, let's already do the maintenance to make sure that there is not going to be these long maintenance times or similar. Maybe not the best example, I think, with bikes, it's really important to always check that things are not loose. But I think you get the idea that when you have the data, you can start to utilize that and then create the automation, the rules, the workflows based on that data and kind of make sure once again that the items are as available as possible.

Tuomo: Yeah, exactly. It's a good highlight that there's this kind of planned automation that you consciously plan and automate this kind of workflow things that you know, almost like configuring how you want to run your operation. And those are based usually into, let's say, system automation where you've accumulated data automatically. And many of the things that you mentioned there, like, for example, Twice automatically tracks the usage of every item, the income and expenses of every item. So your insights into your operational automation that you define as workflows is probably based on these system automations.

And if you wouldn't be using something like Twice Commerce, maybe run it on Excel, this data wouldn't necessarily automatically accumulate. You might have to kind of write it in yourself. So it would be hard to then do triggers based on this automated data collection. So creating a workflow like after 1000 hours of usage, let's do this because we've seen it in the data before or then it's an industrial insight that you have. But anyhow, yeah, there's two kinds of automation. There's the planned automation that you do. And then there's the kind of system automation that the system constantly just automates and collects a lot of data and makes it visible for you to get those insights that you need in order to hone your operation.

Karri: Absolutely. And those built in data points kind of allow you to do very flexible rules. Like you mentioned, like after 1000 hours of rental, do something. And one thing that comes to my mind that also maybe jumps to other segments here is actually you are able to utilize these to get more revenue and kind of keep the inventory flowing. So one idea could be that after 1000 rentals, make this item available also for purchase.

So that's something that a lot of rental businesses are looking that at some point they see that, hey, now it's a good time to actually sell the old fleet. It's still in a good shape. It's usable. I know that there are a lot of people who appreciate this high quality equipment. And that also, of course, gives you money to maybe purchase new inventory articles. And that's once again, something that you can utilize the data to actually know what is really good item that doesn't break down and generates a lot of revenue for you. So these type of automations and rules are really good for the daily operations, but they can also help you actually do more revenue and maybe sell your old inventory as an example.

Tuomo: Precisely. I think at the end of the day, running a rental operation or actually an e-commerce operation, it's a game of, first of all, getting some data in, so getting some sales in and so on. Looking at that data, looking at some key metrics that we've talked about previously in the podcasts, and then asking yourself the question that can I improve these metrics somehow? And then it's an entrepreneur's game. It's an innovation game. It's your industrial knowledge game. It's understanding how can I repair something faster or how can I buy supply cheaper or how can I buy better supply?

And in most of the cases, it's always a combination of looking into the data and your history calls and how has your operation and business performed in the past? Understanding the market, which entrepreneurs usually and managers kind of understand what's the local or global market here? What's the trends there? How do I want to kind of cater to those? And then you always need that final spice of innovation and ingenuity where you come up with innovative solutions or insights. And that's where the competition is still going and risk-taking and all of these things. But yeah, as you said, it's a game of looking at numbers and figuring out where can I improve the key metrics regarding this? And then whether you can automate it with a workflow, because every time someone, usually if your staff kind of has to touch products, there's always a little bit of a cost connected to it. Especially, you probably want to make sure that your staff is doing like high-value jobs, which they're trained to and not necessarily, you know, just writing information on a piece of paper for the sake of log keeping.