Data Drives Business - What Are Your Reports Telling You?

Data Drives Business—What Are Your Reports Telling You?

By: Matt Reinhart

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The success and longevity of a rental operation depends largely on how it can collect, process, and interpret data. Fleet management software enables you to turn data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into business intelligence.

Quality business intelligence can reveal insights hidden in your data and enable teams to make data-driven decisions that will positively impact your company.

In this post, we will take a high-level look at some key reports in Fleet Cost & Care’s NexGen fleet management software and some hidden insights those reports can uncover.

Job Profit and Loss by Work Date Report

This report provides a high-level P&L of each individual job and is critical to evaluating operational expenses as well as determining a company’s ability or inability to generate profits at the job level.

You can view by summary (company-wide), by yard, or by job.
This report can help you assess which jobs are profitable, which customers provide more favorable profit margins, as well as which industries you should direct sales personnel towards.
Hidden Insight: Make sure you are capturing accurate equipment expense. Developing a process for determining what it costs you to run a specific piece of an equipment is a critical value to set for accurate profitability data in a P&L report. This can be input at the unit level.

Job Revenue Forecast Summary Report

A great report developed to forecast upcoming revenue that can also be used to compare billing actuals to estimates and review variances at the end of a billing period.

Look at a high-level summary view or detailed job-level view to see which elements of a job fell short or perhaps went unbilled. Variances should be relatively small.
Remove guess work for your billing department, expedite invoicing, and improve cash flow.
Monitor the habits of sales personnel to ensure they are estimating properly.
Hidden Insight: Uncover unbilled activity by evaluating estimates vs. actuals at the end of a billing period.

Down Rent Report

See how often a unit goes out at a down-rented rate. Down renting is the practice of renting a crane at lower capacity then its rated for. For example, a job requires a 50-ton capacity rough terrain crane, but you only have a 75-ton available in your yard. To secure the job you down rent the 75-ton at the rate of the 50-ton. This situation may be unavoidable at times, but most companies do not track how often they down rent their equipment and therefore do not know how much it cuts into their profits.

Understand how down-renting is affecting revenue at the unit level over time
Secondary unit types must be set up in NexGen at the unit level to capture this data
Operations personnel can use this data to re-examine potential gaps in their fleet
Hidden Insight: If you determine you are only renting a 275-ton crane as a 275-ton unit 52% of the time and are down renting the other 48% you may want to consider changing up your fleet in this area. Can you operate a crane at a lower tonnage capacity and still serve all your customers?

Productive vs. Non-productive Labor Summary Report

This report gives you a good idea of how much your workforce is costing your company.

Understand exactly how much time is being billed to revenue earning jobs and work orders vs. yard time and training.
- Productive Labor– is classified as any labor that is posted against a job, work order, or directly to a unit in your fleet.
- Non-productive Labor – is any labor that does not fit the above criteria, usually associated with yard time and training.
  - Be sure to set up labor classification codes like shop hours, holiday pay, training etc…
Easily get a high-level view of how your labor costs are allocated
Hidden Insight: Do you have a troubling productive vs. non-productive labor ratio? Find out with this report.

Employee Certification Report

This report allows dispatchers to see which certifications each employee has in an easy-to-read layout.

Simplify scheduling and reduce errors by seeing all your employee’s certifications in one place
Certifications can be job site, customer, or unit specific and can be viewed by field personnel from anywhere on our Atom fleet management app
Hidden Insight: Proactively manage your employee’s certifications by using the Coming Due Certifications Report. This report is derivative of the employee certifications report and allows operations personnel to alert staff when a certification is about to expire.

To track the performance of your fleet operations, understand your business, and make critical decisions you need accurate data presented in concise way. Fleet Cost & Care’s reporting logic provides the business intelligence companies need to be successful.