Flex Rental Solutions FAQs

I believe there are 3 things that separate us from all of our competition. We have been the industry leader in web based rental management software for the Live Event Industry for over 7 years. That being said, I believe there is no such thing as perfect software and all software has things that they do well and things that others do better. What is important is to find the right fit for your company.

#1 Feature rich functionality with a good balance of simplicity.
It is always difficult balancing the need to have all the features required to go beyond simple rentals, and plan and execute very complicated rentals that happen on a daily basis. Many other software out on the market, you can make a simple quote easily, however, does it have the functionality, to really plan complex events, with sub rentals and purchases, receiving those into inventory, scanning large events out with cases, and producing easy carnet manifest. Moving gear from one show to the next easily are other examples where we excel against our competition. Some of our customers who have moved to our platform mention that their previous software was very simple, when you get into the typical larger shows, then the power functionality are not there because they are much more immature projects. Our customers appreciate that we handle both easily. The system is incredibly easy and quick to use and quote in, yet powerful enough to deal with day to day complexities that are inherit in our industry.

#2
Configurability
This isn't a one size fits all platform, we have customers who use the product for inventory tracking, quoting, scanning and crew scheduling. We have others who don't do any financial quoting at all, some that don't do any inventory tracking. The system was designed to be able to fit your company needs. We can configure custom elements, workflows, resources etc. Our customers amaze us with how they modify the system to solve their unique challenges. This customizability makes the system a valuable tool for our customers.

#3
Warehouse Usability.
One of the areas we are most proud of is how much our customers us the product. As an example, in a previous life working in a warehouse, we tried to implement two different competitors products. We were fairly successful in the starting process entering inventory and quotes. Where the systems fell apart was when the warehouse started to work in the system. The processes were poorly designed, and you could not make any changes if mistakes or changes were made to the point of after 2 or 3 weeks of trying to force warehouse implementation there was a consensus that we were not going to use the warehouse module. In that case, the "Rental Management Software" became "Financial Management Software" and we should have just stuck with QuickBooks or something similar. I just checked our metrics, and our customers scanned over 22,000,000 items in and out of their warehouses using Flex in the past 12 months. 2,202,736 scans in last September alone. To me that means we are uniquely qualified to call our product "Rental Management Software." From the customers point of view, warehousing and inventory tracking functionality are not afterthoughts, or areas that will be developed in the future. If the software doesn't stand up in real world usage, it's not a viable product. Our numbers prove our capabilities. The beauty to me also is the scanning isn't just a bunch of small shows going out an in that are very simple, but some of the largest, top grossing tours in the world in some of the busiest warehouses in the industry in multiple countries simultaneously. So, the system holds up for ease of use and complexity. I hope you can tell how passionate we are about what many of our competitors think are afterthoughts.

Finally, we have approximately 85% retention rate of all of our customers with over the history of our companies. That tells us that our company has the support and development team to back up the product that our customer rely on day in and day out to make their company successful. (more)

Flex is under active development, and major releases are deployed approximately every few months. Since the start of 2016, Flex has deployed 4 major and 2 minor releases. Our next release, version 4.17.0 is scheduled to be deployed by the end of June 2016. Release notes can be viewed here: https://dev.flexrentalsolutions.com/wiki/display/SUPPORT/4.17.0 (more)