Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management. Striking the Balance Between Profitability and Customer Service

Transcription

1 Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management Striking the Balance Between Profitability and Customer Service

2 Integrated, Industry-Focused, Enterprise-Wide What is a good rental company all about? Three things: Availability, Reliability and Customer Service and this is what Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management is all about. The solution is an integrated enterprise-wide business application that supports all the requirements of equipment rental companies. It enables accurate monitoring of equipment availability, location and utilization levels, as well as effective collaboration with all partners in the rental supply chain. The application helps handle all core business processes from complete rental management, including maintenance and servicing, procurement, supply chain management and financial management, to business intelligence and performance management. It also helps deliver all the management information needed to continuously measure, plan and improve the way equipment rental companies operate.

3 In Rental, Balance Is the Challenge Comprehensive rental software support is vital for the success of all serious operators in today s growing and increasingly international equipment rental industry. It s all about operating as one company, but executing locally at each depot. Rental software must be able to support this by providing one centralized system that can be used locally in order to execute in accordance with locally adopted best practices. Most firms have already invested in IT systems to control the everyday operations of their rental depots, but in many cases these will have to be enhanced with more robust solutions to cope with the varied and complex requirements of a consolidating and more competitive marketplace. Maintaining the highest levels of equipment availability and service at competitive prices is vital. But it must be done profitably. You cannot afford to operate a contract at a loss just to keep a customer happy. As an integrated, enterprisewide business application, Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management helps you to strike the right balance. M3 Enterprise Rental Management provides best-ofbreed rentals functionality along with world-class supply chain management functionality and this is where Lawson delivers the highest return on investment compared with other vendors.

4 Delivering Real Business Benefits Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management gives you the tools to be successful in all aspects of your equipment rental business from buying paper clips and pencils for your back office to procuring the latest piece of heavy equipment. The enterprise software is comprised of a broad suite of applications that are integrated and platform neutral. It is built to eliminate dependencies on different IT system platform providers and maximize the return on total IT investment by offering the lowest cost per transaction. The suite is tailored to the needs of equipment rental companies that cannot tolerate the unstructured, unmanageable and costly environment of disparate proprietary business applications. It gives complete visibility of all equipment and can help deliver additional sales volumes through increased market penetration and margin enhancement, making it one of the strongest resources a rental company can have. Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management provides a basis for product, business and sales development. It also enables you to streamline your rental organization and create complex rental contracts to provide a foundation for longterm partnerships with your customers. Rental from Your Point of View The broad suite of enterprise applications contained in Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management covers everything from customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, enterprise management to supply chain management. These key management areas are supported by enterprise performance management, workplace management and value chain collaboration. In this brochure, we look at the rental industry from your point of view and from your way of operating. We dissect your organization and outline the specific functionality and applications that M3 Enterprise Rental Management delivers within each component internally, from your rental depot to your head office, and externally, from your field service to your sales operation. Rental Depot Rental Management Lawson M3 Short Term Rental manages the flow of rental or loan objects to external or internal customers and enables you to invoice rental charges for this service. Integrated with supply chain management, financial management and service management, it gives you the tools to manage your day-to-day rental business and offers complete visibility of all equipment, which enables you to maximize profitability through additional sales volumes, increased market penetration and margin enhancement. Re-Rent The re-rent functionality facilitates the renting of equipment from a third party in order to meet a customer s requirements. This is handled by raising an automatic back-to-back purchase order against the rental contract and ensures that information pertinent to the rental agreement, initial purchase orders, and any distribution orders are updated.

5 Service Management Lawson M3 Service Management is specifically designed for companies that have a service operation as part of their business. It enables you to manage and control your service organization, generating complex service contracts to promptly and efficiently handle service calls. It means you can manage your entire organization with one integrated solution, providing a foundation for building long-term partnerships with your customers. Service Agreements Lawson M3 Service Agreements covers the entire service agreement flow, from establishing service agreements or meter invoicing agreements to invoicing these agreements. It provides comprehensive functionality for defining and maintaining different types of service agreements, including agreements for warranty, full or partial service, preventive service and meter invoicing. M3 Service Agreements automatically selects the right level of service to fulfill your commitments and meet your customers expectations. Field & Depot Service M3 Service Management enables you to manage and follow up on service on equipment that is supplied and/or covered by an agreement. It provides comprehensive functionality for handling both field and depot service, from the point a call is received through invoicing and statistics. Integration with service and warranty agreements means that you always know what level of service to provide and what the agreements include or exclude. Also, it enables planning of engineering time, including both breakdowns and preventive service visits. M3 Service Management helps you to maintain optimal inventory levels and utilization of engineers. It can improve invoicing accuracy and provides valuable management information. Mobile Service Lawson M3 Mobile Service supports all of the requirements and possibilities of service technicians out in the field by combining the strength of Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management with the mobile convenience of a portable PC. M3 Mobile Service runs on any portable computer, from standard laptops and tablet PCs to more robust and rugged units, giving wireless access to M3 Enterprise Rental Management whenever and wherever you need it. Your technicians can work more effectively, with better customer service and profitability, without having to deal with paperwork or travel to hub locations. M3 Mobile Service will also optimize your entire service organization by helping to make it more efficient from call logging and dispatch lead times to the planning, executing, reporting and invoicing of jobs.

6 Sales Sales Force Automation Lawson M3 Sales Force Automation helps you focus on the revenue and profitgenerating initiatives needed to retain current customers and to acquire new customer segments from your web site presence. M3 Sales Force Automation is a key component of your overall Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. It can improve sales efficiency and allow you to implement sales strategies to suit different markets, customers and prospects. Supply Chain Management Lawson M3 Supply Chain Management offers a powerful method of supporting the planning, scheduling and fulfillment of the supply chain, resulting in optimum customer service levels and maximum profitability. The application features tools that provide visibility and control over the information, material and financial flows throughout the extended value chain. This includes planning tools that cover the extended value chain down to individual resources on a strategic as well as an operational level. Distribution Order Processing Lawson M3 Distribution Order Processing enables you to control the flow of equipment and materials across your entire hierarchy of depots and warehouses, allowing you to plan more effectively. M3 Distribution Order Processing controls the delivery and return of rental equipment to customers, capturing equipment receipt at a customer site and the final physical off-hire. The software is specifically designed to support an environment where diversity is the norm and is therefore highly configurable. Furthermore, the application enables the transfer of equipment between depots and other sites. In addition to being directly related to warehouse and depot management and transportation planning, the system automatically supports all financial and statistical transactions as an integral part of the process. M3 Distribution Order Processing also enables you to pick and dispatch equipment and execute continuous replenishment programs for your entire warehouse depot network. Delivery reliability and flexibility will increase and costs will be reduced. Transportation Management Lawson M3 Transportation Management supports most activities in the distribution process, from transferring equipment between depots and remote distribution centers through delivery to customer sites. It enables you to increase speed and quality throughout your distribution network by planning your deliveries down to the minute. With M3 Transportation Management, you streamline your transportation processes, thereby maximizing delivery precision while minimizing administrative costs. Warehousing Lawson M3 Warehouse Management addresses most activities required inside warehouses and distribution centers. It offers best-of-breed functionality that can speed up the flow of goods, from receipt to shipping. M3 Warehouse Management can help bring increased speed and quality to your supply chain, which can result in reduced cost and improved delivery precision and credibility.

7 Head Office Financial Controlling Lawson M3 Financial Controlling is a complete set of tools for efficient internal and time accounting, cost accounting, product costing, budgeting, and cash management. Each tool enables you to analyze and plan, as well as display detailed management views of your organization s key business processes. Together, the components in M3 Financial Controlling offer an integrated, enterprise-wide approach, providing access to essential information needed for managing costs and staying competitive. By eliminating the barriers between your business units and existing business processes, the application delivers secure, real-time access to information without duplicating efforts in the organization. Financial Management Lawson M3 Financial Management enables you to access and utilize the crucial information that drives today s business decisions. You are able to capture, analyze and simulate critical trends based on your unique business goals and requirements. Advanced functionality handles all aspects of financial accounting, budgeting, reporting, consolidation and transaction processing with the appropriate internal control. M3 Financial Management helps save costs, eliminate redundancies, streamline activities and allow redeployment of assets to more profitable activities. The solution supports international, cross-company, multicurrency and multilingual needs, and its configurable structure can be tailored to meet local, regional, national and global business models. The integrated components in M3 Financial Management are flexible, internet-enabled and handle most aspects of financial management. Fixed Assets Lawson M3 Fixed Assets is a comprehensive asset accounting tool, enabling you to select the optimal accounting and tax strategies for your enterprise. You are able to administer, track and control your investments in property, plant and equipment throughout your enterprise and around the world. M3 Fixed Assets helps you improve and control the accessibility and flow of asset information. It supports the asset life cycle from purchase or construction to disposition, and has a flexible fixed asset record that provides access to all the information you need, including asset information for accounting, acquisition, inventory, location, insurance and tax. M3 Fixed Assets is integrated with general ledger, budgeting, accounts payable, maintenance, project management and accounts receivable. Flexible user-defined depreciation methods are featured, allowing you to meet a wide range of depreciation requirements. Contract Management Lawson M3 Contract Management produces detailed statistics from rental contracts, including quotation hit/failure rates, and monitors accrued revenue, forecasted revenue, costs and equipment utilization rates, thereby streamlining lead times, minimizing costs and optimizing your fleet. You can help maximize the profitability of the entire fleet by providing the necessary information to calculate the rate of return for each piece of rental equipment. The result is an improved bottom line both for you and your customers.

8 Supplier Relationship Management Lawson M3 Supplier Relationship Management creates a structured environment for long-term strategic relations with your suppliers. It allows you to execute according to best practices with measurable results in the areas of procurement, e-procurement and re-rent. Procurement Lawson M3 Procurement efficiently supports most aspects of procurement, including supplier selection and evaluation, creation and renewal of supplier agreements, requisitioning, purchase order processing and monitoring, receiving and quality control, claims, invoice control and statistics. Different categories of orders processed in M3 Procurement are available from the same data source. e-procurement Lawson M3 e-procurement, Lawson s web-based e-procurement application, enables you to simplify, automate and integrate many of the administrative tasks related to indirect procurement. You can achieve impressive time and cost savings by making the purchasing cycle for indirect products and services more effective, establish preferred-supplier contracts that contain set criteria as well as capture relevant purchasing information at the corporate level so you can focus on strategic decision making. Enterprise Performance Management Lawson M3 Enterprise Performance Management is a superset of applications and processes that cross traditional departmental boundaries to manage the full life cycle of business decision making. M3 Enterprise Performance Management combines strategic goal setting and alignment with planning, forecasting and modeling capabilities. It uses powerful analytics, along with tactical reporting, to drive smarter operational plans that consider inevitable and ever-present tradeoffs. The ability to respond to changes or opportunities as they occur, re-plan business activities and begin execution quickly provides rental companies that use the M3 Enterprise Performance Management framework with a competitive advantage over slower-moving, less agile organizations. Business Performance Management Lawson M3 Business Performance Management focuses on opportunity analysis setting targets and planning profitability realization for your improvement projects and transforming the ever-increasing flow of data that M3 Enterprise Rental Management and other systems generate into competitive business intelligence information. The full potential of M3 Enterprise Rental Management is realized as the data it generates becomes useful for making tactical and strategic decisions. Management Reporting Business managers need full and immediate visibility into all aspects of corporate operations, not least in the rental industry, where, for example, knowing the location and utilization of all equipment can make a big difference to a company s profit margins. Access to accurate and dependable data on which to make informed management decisions is therefore vital. In addition, organizations today face added pressures to provide the right documentation to prove their compliance with various legal requirements. As a result, the need for more accurate reporting and record keeping is more apparent now than ever before. Cognos ReportNet is a leading, web-based reporting tool included in M3 Enterprise Rental Management. It uses the data from the entire application suite to produce useful, professional, but also easy-to-understand business reports.

9 Opportunity Analyzer Lawson M3 Opportunity Analyzer is a key enabler within the M3 Enterprise Performance Management methodology for continuous business process improvement. M3 Enterprise Performance Management consists of four steps: opportunity analysis, support for business process improvement, measuring key performance indicators and evaluating performance. M3 Opportunity Analyzer supports the first two. An opportunity analysis enables senior management to define which strategic initiatives are required to achieve strategic objectives for growth and profitability. There are three stages in implementing an opportunity analysis mapping, targeting and planning. A comprehensive business review can be finalized within four to six weeks. The opportunity analysis provides the input to clearly define the process improvement objectives for an enterprise system upgrade or a new implementation in four key areas: identifying opportunities, supporting best practices, targeting performance indicators and ensuring that the project conforms to corporate strategy. Up and Running with Lawson Enterprise Rental Management Lawson s Step-by-Step Solution Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management offers a modular, flexible and open approach to implementation that is based on the understanding that many rental companies may not be ready to implement a full-suite, enterprise-wide system right away. Called StepWise, the methodology involves the gradual phasing in of M3 Enterprise Rental Management, so that you can add functionality when you need to without putting operations at risk. StepWise offers the following benefits: Process Efficiency An industry sector approach means existing data can be reused. Energy is focused on what is unique for the customer, allowing for a rapid and efficient implementation. Phased Improvement Rather than being a quick fix, improvements are intelligently phased in. Fulfilled Implementation Measures agreed during presales/sales are methodically followed up. Dialog Approach Continuous dialog between the customer and the implementation team safeguards customer satisfaction. Better Business By integrating Lawson s technical sophistication and business knowledge, tactical and strategic benefits emerge. Along with StepWise, Lawson also offers a variety of implementation models depending on customer need: StepChange The implementation methodology used with new Lawson customers that are converting to Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management from other ERP systems.

10 Stepping Up The implementation methodology for existing Lawson customers that are upgrading from earlier M3 versions to the Java-based version. ValueStep Used by customers wishing to extend the breadth of the solution with other Lawson applications, for example, M3 Sales & Marketing System or M3 Automatic Document Capture. Services and Support Your Solution, Your Way The value and quality of Lawson M3 Enterprise Rental Management is ensured by the powerful tools included in the solution that enable you to configure the system according to your needs. The foundation for our service and support is the stability and simplicity of the system itself. We have created a solution that will not require extensive maintenance and follow-up. The platform for most of these tools is the Java platform Eclipse. New tools also give you access to large amounts of data that facilitate self service by helping you uncover and correct errors. You can change the user interface, integrate internally or externally with other systems, and even create new business objects or modify existing ones. Simply choose the functionality you want and create your own perfect-fit solution without any modification to the standard components. Improved Quality Assurance M3 Enterprise Rental Management offers unparalleled quality assurance made possible through a rigorous and thorough testing process. This has been implemented to ensure increased reliability and greater robustness. Again, this results in less internal and external maintenance and lower cost. Technology Integrated, Configurable, Platform Neutral Best-of-breed point solutions are costly to buy, and the resources required to maintain and integrate them with an existing environment to support end-toend business processes are prohibitive. As a result, the chances of achieving return on investment are slim. That s why Lawson delivers a full-suite solution that contains all the functionality you d expect to find across a whole range of best-of-breed applications. Broad Solutions At Lawson, the customer s need for getting broad solutions up and running quickly, at a lower cost and thereby offering a higher return on investment, continues to drive the development of configurable and integrated business applications. No two rental companies business processes are exactly alike. To become a leader, the design of your business processes is critical. For example, synchronizing equipment supply and demand across an enterprise differs vastly between different rental industry segments and depends on an individual company s specific prerequisites. Therefore, a solution based on a standard application must always be more or less company-specific. One cornerstone of M3 Enterprise Rental Management is its ability to offer standard business applications that are easily configurable for specific needs. 10

11 Java Technology Built with Java, Lawson s state-of-the-art solution provides you with low cost of ownership, high scalability, complete platform independence and the ability to run on any major operating platform. Business components can be configured and reconfigured to continuously meet your changing business needs and keep your operations competitive. As your business expands, our Java-based technology provides you with practically unlimited scalability. Workplace Management Lawson M3 Workplace Management is a set of applications and tools that provides end-users with a personalized user experience when interacting with business systems and collaboration tools such as M3 Enterprise Rental Management. Its generic web-based user interface provides a consistent way of working and a common look and feel across all M3 Enterprise Rental Management functionality. Customized user interfaces for specific user roles can be created, while content integration capabilities enable the creation of full-scale enterprise portals. Value Chain Collaboration Lawson M3 Value Chain Collaboration streamlines the collaboration between all participants in the value chain, within an enterprise and across enterprises. It is the engine needed to realize the possibilities of secure communication with partners, suppliers and customers. Why Lawson? Because simpler is better. In 2006, Lawson Software and Intentia merged to form the new Lawson. We deliver software and implementation services to 4,000 customers in the manufacturing, distribution and services industries across 40 countries. Our Financials, Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Business Intelligence, Asset Management and industry-specific solutions help customers streamline processes and enhance their business performance. And by simplifying the process of deploying and using our applications, we help customers reduce costs while increasing their flexibility. 11

12 Headquarters: Lawson USA 380 St. Peter Street St. Paul, MN Tel International Headquarters: Lawson Sweden Vendevägen 89 Box 596 SE Danderyd Tel PSM en