Document Management for the Equipment Rental Industry: Tech Trends Spotlight

If you own or work in an equipment rental company, you know changes happen constantly and with little warning. Rental companies that want to stay competitive must prioritize supplying the best rental offerings and superbly maintaining them while finding ways to avoid additional costs whenever possible. It’s no easy feat.

Along with staying on top of updates in equipment specifications and demands, rental companies also need to prepare for and manage changes concerning their business applications, which are responsible for ensuring continuity pertaining to customer service, sales, and industry compliance.

To that tune, various technology trends have emerged in the equipment rental industry to help companies maximize margins, streamline operations, and optimize their product offerings and service for customers.

Enter document management.

Equipment rental companies need to provide the tools for their people to perform efficiently with the best, most accurate, and customer-centric outcome. To overcome and eliminate error-prone, tedious data entry and repetition that slows down operations and fogs operational visibility, many equipment rental companies are turning to document management solutions.

This tech spotlight will explore what document management is, how it’s evolving as an industry trend, and how you can begin to leverage this rising star in equipment rental technology.

Document Management 101: The Competitive Advantage

Document management refers to an electronic service that includes digitizing data, imaging and scanning, archiving, and indexing. This software will assist a rental operation in converting manual data to electronic data—no more pen and paper required. This mitigates risk in data loss or human error, reduces costs, and streamlines your workflow.

A proper document management system will increase your overall daily processes to render them more efficient, allowing your team to focus on tasks within their skillset instead of getting bogged down in the manual handling of data. Document management platform features are also important, as they allow the user to store and retrieve essential business data when on-demand.

Rental organizations use document management systems to create, track, and store important digitized documents related to their daily rental transactions and equipment maintenance. These systems can vary in complexity, offering everything from simple scanning and retrieval to more sophisticated tools that provide optical character recognition (OCR), collaboration tools, purchase and payables approval workflows, information drilldown, security, and auditing capabilities.

Document management software stores metadata electronically with each document and often lists the type of document, the date, and the user who stored the data. Once they are digitized, these documents can be integrated or shared with other systems, validated, indexed, stored, retrieved on demand, and distributed.

The good news for rental businesses is that document management systems are now quite cost-effective and easily available to mid-market organizations.

5 Document Management Trends in the Coming Year

With document management systems more accessible and more affordable than ever, expect to see the following document management trends continue in the equipment rental industry:

• Cloud storage capacity growth
  Document management is ultimately all about automating data input and storage, and that needs to live somewhere. The cloud storage market size was valued at $46.12 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $222.25 billion by 2027, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.9% from 2020 to 2027. Cloud technology is the new industry standard, and all organizations have some form of cloud storage. In the coming years, this is slated to expand exponentially.
• Stronger online security
  Your documents have sensitive customer, transaction, and business data in them. With cyber break-ins abounding, this year has seen some of the largest reinvestments in online cyber security. Expect to see more public moves towards tighter security standards over the coming years as market reach and cloud storage capacity increase. Microsoft Azure, for example, has some of the tightest, trustiest storage security available on the market today.
• Extended mobile access for the field
  Employee apps are the new normal. Storing and sending information for mobile workforces and field employees has never been easier with rental and document management technology growing. Winning and retaining contracts is made easier through an accessible mobile application. Amp up the customer experience with information on tap from any mobile device and the intelligence to make smart customer-centric decisions, and you have a recipe for success in the equipment rental industry.
• More affordable options in an increasingly competitive market
  As the market becomes saturated with many affordable, high-touch, and user-friendly document management solutions, the number of competitors vying for your business will also increase.
• Enhanced collaboration features
  Employees need easy access to use and share the information they need to be productive. Look for optimized collaboration that unites all your data and documents in one secure platform.

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Stepping Into Document Management for Your Equipment Rental Business
Further digitizing your business documents will boost your organization’s productivity.

Keep track of all the important data your unique rental business needs to have on hand for optimal operations with the ODT Rentals 365 solution. Our platform integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and is an all-in-one operational system that gives you real-time access to everything you need.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your business processes, contact us here to discuss some strategies that can enhance your day-to-day operations and streamline team productivity.