Do not be the slave of your data. Be the master!

You certainly already have a lot of various reports and tables that you use every day to pilot your operations and optimize your sales. After years of doing it, your process is fast (almost just because you use to do it) and seems to be easy. However, you know that it is not perfect or ideal. Why? because :

• it requires a lot of time, manually consuming your energy
• it relies on you only (not or incompletely done when you are away)
• many other team members including the management (yourself ?) are waiting for your updated report

I have some prospects who are working during the evening to do their rate shopping and aggregate their data extracted from the operating system to update their pivot table!

Here are the 5 steps to follow

To start implementing your digitalization project, two minimum steps have to be completed.

Step 1 Data has to be available.

In quality for sure! It seems obvious that all operating systems provide reliable data but I have seen many systems supplying bad quality. No matter if you are a top franchisee in a big Mediterranean destination or a local operator, data quality was and is sometimes an issue.

Then, data has to be available every night. I am not referring to reports available in the software but real IT extract usually running via SQL queries. We have two prospects with whom we are facing a lot of difficulties setting a bunch of extracts every night. And these difficulties have nothing linked to the car rental operator size.

The revenue manager of a major corporate country located on the west side of Europe stated that he has to wait till 10 am every day to get all his Business Intelligence optimization reports updated. So, in practice, he can not start analyzing before 10!

Step 2: Do not try to get the MORE data but the RIGHT one.

The one that counts. The one that enables the business analyst to understand better, more and capture the future trends, the data that is useful to anticipate the demand and the fleet planned.

At WeYield, here are the minimum data requirements we have to get every night stored on our servers hosted in France following GDPR regulations (not on AWS or Google):

• Activity: the transactions from a reservation to a rental agreement and its invoice. For each transaction, we need to have all info about departing and returning dates, status. We collect all info about the revenues and the sales (origin, segment, customer)
• Fleet situation: we need to get a snapshot of all fleet movements at a given time of the day for every plate id. We need to also get the infleeting and defleeting date of each vehicle (cars and trucks)
• A fleet plan is a supplement that is highly appreciated by the revenue manager. Usually set by the Fleet Manager, it gives the revenue manager a clearer understanding of when the fleet is supposed to increase on which station. It you do not have it, you can build it in excel and drop the file on our storage manually.

Tip: here the list of the car rental operating systems we love at WeYield because they are efficient, reliable, and fast to plug with us.

Now you have achieved two main steps thus

 you have good data (we can help you to collect them)

 you have decided to stop feeding some excel spreadsheets manually (we can not help you as it is your sole decision but we can assist you if you want to try at least!)

Let’s continue on the digitalization journey

Let’s dive into the core of the digitalization of your revenue management process. What will this project deliver as a benefit to you daily?

Step 3: much less effort.

That’s nice, isn’t it? All your piloting reports are now aggregated and computed during the night while you are sleeping. The key performance indicators are updated every morning. I mean the KPI for yesterday, the year-on-year and most important, the ones for the future to come, etc, etc. You are more efficient, more productive.

Step 4: you share this info without sending any reports via email to anybody.

All KPI or analytics are automatically updated and whenever some team fellows want to have a snapshot of their situation, they can refresh their browser. In addition, the information is instantly forwarded to all teams who has an account (not limitation in number of users at WeYield).

For the management, there is no more the headache of discussing for hours, the different point of view of the Sales vs the Operations vs the Finance attending a meeting with their own set of data that they all run differently. Now, with one central piloting tool, anybody can look at the data using their own angle but no more time is wasted challenging the source and way they have been computed anymore.

Step 5: the accessibility is instant at any time, from anywhere.

There is no manual interference to prepare, digest the data, update the reports and drop an email to the recipient list to share some analytics.

I have one prospect and one client that are both GM of their company. They are asking their business analyst to write an email every morning with various screenshots of different reports. With WeYield apps, they can check on the mobile directly during their breakfast!

Recent Covid19 lockdown put a light on the importance of maintaining the flow of data access when nobody is at the office. 

In conclusion, for me, digital adoption is a core driver of sustainability and future growth. It is not a question of simply implementing a digitalization process but using the piloting tools available to the full extent possible. Turn the difficult times into an opportunity to rebuild your data structure and set new standards. And in particular, the digitization of uses has come to overcome distancing and confinement.