How RentalTec's rental of complex technical products grew with RentMagic
RentalTec started small but had big growth ambitions. They sought flexibly customizable rental software that could facilitate complex technical products and ended up with RentMagic. The partnership ensures that the rental branch continues to grow and more and more logistical and financial processes are automated and streamlined.
Arvid de Decker has been working for the Belgian company RentalTec for almost five years as an IT operations advisor. RentalTec started with RentMagic in 2019 and is now one of its oldest customers. They supply test and measurement equipment for various industries such as telecommunications (fiber optics), aviation, defense and automotive. They are mostly complex technical products.
Arvid de Decker explains how the cooperation came about: “Before the cooperation with RentMagic started, we did not have an ERP system. We had just started as a company after the market was consolidated into one player, through an acquisition by a large investment party. At that time, all products were still being tracked and maintained via Excel. Nevertheless, we soon noticed that we could not grow that way, because test and measurement instruments are quite complex.
But we were not able to grow that way.
In addition, during that period we purchased a lot of products, sometimes as many as a few hundred per month. The first time you rent a product to a customer it is still easy to keep track of it in Excel. But the moment all those products come back, it becomes more difficult.
It also takes a lot of time to enter everything manually into an Excel compared to an ERP system. Since growth was our ambition, we started looking for a solution that could facilitate our growth. And that's how we ended up at RentMagic."
Supporting rental of complex technical products
Arvid continues: “We initially looked for an ERP system such as MS Dynamics or Exact Online. But the problem is that rental is a special market with many features you never encounter in sales. And those big ERP packages couldn't support that very well.
In addition, we already had some experience with MS Dynamics and knew it wasn't perfect. First of all, it was a pricey package, but it was also not that flexible to adapt to our rather complex products. For example, our products have calibration cycles that are difficult to manage and you also need to be able to track those in your system. However, that's not in most ERP packages. Neither was RentMagic, but we were able to build it in later. And it was precisely this flexibility that we needed.""We save maybe 10x as much time with RentMagic compared to working in Excel. That was an incredibly inefficient system, keeping track of all sorts of different tables."
Good value for money and pay for what you use
Arvid continued about the price of RentMagic: “In addition, RentMagic was good value for money. Most ERP packages are expensive. RentMagic was more affordable and also scales easily per user. A user license is easily added, but the revenue model is focused on active sessions. So some users have an account with us but don't actively use the software. And then we don't pay for that either. So you only pay for what you use."
Growing with RentalTec's ambitions
Arvid also talks about the way we work together: “In fact, RentMagic grew along with our company at the same time. In the beginning it was much simpler in design, it was in an early stage of development and a lot of functionality had not yet been implemented."
By now, RentMagic is much more professional. For example, we notice that the planning of certain releases is much better, which in turn helps us plan better. We have really grown together. And we both still have growth ambitions. That is why it is so nice that we are closely involved in the development of new functionality. For example, we are now working together on functionality that facilitates the purchase of goods. This is now being developed partly due to our demand for a larger group of customers, and we are also thinking about the solution.RentMagics development team has many qualities and they know us well by now. Our single point of contact Erik thinks along with us very well because by now he also knows our business well. It's very pleasant. The collaboration with RentMagics founder Bart is also very pleasant; he is still practically involved with the software and has insight into the product. He is not a top manager who only looks at the turnover.
In short, the cooperation has always gone smoothly. But we have been working together for a long time and of course there have been problems from time to time. For example, we once had a billing error. But we were able to frame and resolve that pretty quickly within an acceptable time frame. As a result, our customers didn't actually notice it that much. For us it was a bit of a panic, but RentMagic handled it well and quickly."
The 4 benefits of RentMagic according to RentalTec
The benefit of the cooperation, according to RentalTec, lies mainly in process automation. For example, they send customers an automatic confirmation when products are returned.
RentalTec also appreciates the extensive reporting capabilities, especially now that they have Power BI access. Everything is done in their ERP system, but they also work with a billing and accounting program. They use Exact Online for that. With the integration between RentMagic and Exact and access to Power BI, everything has become much more visual.
In addition, RentalTec's rental branch has become less error-prone because of that process automation. For example, they are now partially working on process automation of their inside sales. So that small financial mistakes are a thing of the past. So they avoid mistakes in an order that a customer has already signed for.
Also, RentalTec and RentMagic are now working together to improve verification capabilities, including VAT numbers. This number verification is very important to prevent us from entering incorrect numbers into the software.
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