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Keeping track of rental inventory has never been easy, and accurate accounting and controls are always under the pressure of daily operations. The top priority is to get that pump out to the customer — one of the many rush jobs you’re swamped with — and the line at the counter is getting restless. The paperwork naturally gravitates to a lower level in the great pressure bucket of things to do just now.
So, no, it’s not a perfect world. Record-keeping can be incorrect, permanently delayed or just plain missing in action. A bad seed you plant now can blossom into all kinds of problems later on — you know that, but ... record-keeping remains
on the back burner, waiting for a reliable approach that could reduce the errors that result when human nature meets the reality of daily
operations.
Maybe here’s your answer. You probably already know about advances in the Palm Pilot, the carry-around computer. It now has a bar-code reading feature and it has its own operating system, which acts as a conduit to your software.
Systematic Software, a rental management software company, is marketing a unit it calls GRIP, which puts your inventory in your palm and lets you record what you’re doing at the moment so you’re directly connected to your processes and controls.
“It’s a new metal-tag approach that will place a bar code on every piece of equipment you have,” says James Lolley, president of Systematic.
These durable metal tags attach to your equipment for easy reading by the Palm Pilot, which comes with a docking station to update your computer system. They operate in tandem to allow you to bring your software to your inventory.
“Whether you’re preparing rental or sales contracts, doing
pickups or deliveries, handling returns, taking physical inventories or recording field meter readings, virtually any time your equipment is being recorded for any reason, it can now be done immediately and with confidence,” says
Lolley.
Lolley can be reached at (800) 361-1233.
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