Taking control over your equipment dealership with a single ERP solution

In sales, rental and service of machines and equipment, you get to deal with many different processes. It might seem impossible to properly automate and manage all these processes. But if you want to have full control over your operations, one complete ERP solution is the best way forward.

Many departments, processes, requirements and wishes

Take a tour through your company and ask people in every department about the processes they carry out, documents they use and reports they consult. Parts and equipment purchasing, parts and equipment quoting and sales, the complete rental process, accounting, planning, executing and administrative processing of work orders, inventory management, contact with customers, suppliers and partners, contract management, fleet management, etc. The biggest challenge for your organization is to have all these diverse processes under control, so that they are carried out correctly and on time.

"The biggest challenge for your organization is to have all these diverse processes under control, so that they are carried out correctly and on time."

Complex integrations and missing information

It is difficult to find a single system that is capable to support and manage all these processes. Often, this leads to one of the following decisions:

  1. Different systems, e.g. a financial system, a rental solution and a service planning system, which are then connected to each other.
  2. An ERP system with limitations where it is accepted that some processes are not or merely supported.
  3. An ERP system for which a lot of customizations are developed

Although these choices are all meant to make things easier, they only make the problem even bigger. Option 1 leads to complex and expensive integrations that moreover cannot compete with one central system. Option 2 is to use ERP without taking advantage of the most important benefit of ERP – to control ALL business processes. And option 3 is complex and expensive in terms of development and maintenance.

Go for one ERP solution

The most important problem of all the choices above is that they do not offer what your equipment dealership really needs: complete insight into your equipment from every department and throughout the entire life cycle. To become more successful, you must really go for one single ERP solution that can deal with the challenges of sales, rental, service, parts, finance and all other topics that are daily business for equipment dealers.

Philip van Kemenade is marketing manager at Dysel and is in contact with software end users every day.