Continuous improvement of business practices involves looking at your history to see what worked and what can be improved. Knowledge of the movement of your equipment is vital to keeping your business healthy - both financially and operationally. While equipment rental might not be your primary moneymaker, the lack of available equipment can be the biggest cause of losing money. For some companies, renting equipment allows you to provide labor, as well. Since renting equipment from other companies can get out of control it's vital to see the movements of re-rent to effectively manage returns while minimizing freight costs. The areas for improvement are countless and Product History provides the insight needed.
Historic movements of products are calculated, summarized, and saved, allowing you to examine a slice of time. The key idea behind product history is that you can see your asset value, cost, price to your customer, and weight. The data is summarized and/or filtered by whatever value you'd like, such as a job site, owner (what you own and what your vendor owns that you're renting to your customer). At the root of the history is a daily balance. This daily balance shows the total quantities located at a job site or branch office/laydown yard. When parts are delivered to a location the balance increases, and when they're returned the balance decreases. This daily balance is used to calculate the daily rent, cost, and weight.
Figure 1 - Product history for a few parts
To get started, click the Add button to calculate product history for each month you’ll want to view. Start with the month of your first shipment. Enter any date during the month (entering any date from 6/1/10 or 6/30/10 will generate data for June 2010, for example) and click the Calculate button. This action calculates the daily balances throughout your company for the month that you select and stores them for quick summarization later.
Since the daily balance is based on the prior day’s balance plus any deliveries or returns, you must calculate product history for each month in a range. If you wish to see 1/1/10 – 3/31/10, for example, you can’t calculate just January and March; February must be calculated, also. (And, as mentioned above, you should start with the month of your first shipment so that your beginning balance is accurate.)
After the data is calculated for the months you want to see, enter start and end dates and load the data by clicking Refresh. If you want to summarize the data by, for example, location and owner as shown below, then drag and drop those fields onto the row headers. Notice that after these fields are dropped, the data is grouped by the value (location, then owner). The daily balance is displayed for each of these, as seen in Figure 2.
In Figure 2, note that the daily balance increases on 4/2 for several parts as deliveries are made. You see not only the total by location, but also the quantity that is owned by you and by the vendor you're renting from (Alverca Concrete, in this case). If there were multiple re-rent owners, you'd see each one here. Compare this with Figure 1 and you'll see that the totals are the same for each day.
Figure 2 - Product history grouped by location and re-rent owner
Now let's swap out Balance with Rent to see the total rent value for each day.
In Figure 3 below we see the value of the rent (rent rate * daily balance).
Figure 3 - Displaying Rent instead of Daily Balance
Another powerful feature in the pivot is the ability to filter the data. To do this, hover your mouse over one of the buttons that you want to filter. You'll see a small filter icon appear in the upper right corner of the button.
When you click this button a list of values appear. From this list you can select all values (the default), one value, or several. Let's look at the equipment that is owned by Alverca Concrete by filtering on the owner (remember, what you own is blank under Owner in the list). The location and value of the rent for each day is shown in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4 - All Equipment Owned by Alverca
Sorting is accomplished by clicking on the sort arrow. Note that all buttons have an up and down triangle, which indicates the sort order.
The pivot control has a print preview that allows you to save this data to Excel or PDF for further analysis or sharing with employees or customers.
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