Point of Rental – Best New Product General

It is all in the timing

The ongoing global pandemic highlighted the need for companies to be able to communicate with both their internal staff and customers with ease without the usual in person contact.

Whether that was for co-ordination of work activities; organising deliveries or even simply billing clients, the need to be prepared for online business was essential.

Point of Rental, a company with more than 600 years of in-store hire experience, who specialise in hire software, were prepared for the need to help hire companies communicate and work more effectively online.

“Point of Rental took several steps to bring contactless hire solutions to the hire industry when COVID-19 first struck,” Dave Cameron, APAC Regional Director, Point of Rental Software, said.

“First, we modified our Rental eSign product to make it useful for every hire business, regardless of which hire software they were using to run their business. We made it free for the first three months to give businesses the opportunity to evaluate their business in a pandemic environment before committing to any additional expenses.

“We discovered businesses had trouble collecting payments electronically, so we added payment collection functionality, creating eSign and Pay.”

Point of Rental also added software tools so that documents could be sent electronically for signature via SMS, eSign and Pay, allowing hire companies throughout Australia to continue to trade during the global pandemic.

“All of our product development is aimed at making hire and rental businesses more successful,” Cameron added.

“More and more, hire and rental businesses are taking on different software systems to perform specialised tasks, in addition to their main business systems such as sales and marketing, accounting and finance, purchasing, asset tracking, ecommerce, business intelligence amongst others.

 “As specialisation becomes more advanced,  business will become increasingly dependent on software that can seamlessly to connect to, and work with, a multitude of systems that will exist both inside and outside the business.”

Point of Rental were a notable winner of the HIRE21 Best New Product General awards.

“Winning the award was genuinely a complete surprise,” Cameron said. “The Point of Rental team is really pumped, and everyone involved feels proud to have contributed to our success.

“It is delightful to be recognised by the hire and rental Industry because it reflects that the fact that we are making a difference. Like any positive feedback, winning an award helps us refine what we do in the future because we can focus our efforts on areas that we know are valued.”

As for the future, Cameron believes software speciality will be a valuable tool, as individual companies seek to gain a competitive advantage.

“As specialisation becomes more advanced,  business will become increasingly dependent on software that can seamlessly to connect to, and work with, a multitude of systems that will exist both inside and outside the business,” Cameron said.

“Additionally, businesses that can use their data effectively using reporting and business intelligence tools will make better decisions about their capital investments, labour and resources, pricing and customer satisfaction will gain a huge advantage.”