Studies have revealed that, on average, the annual maintenance costs for a car rental management system account for almost 22% of their overall expenses.

This is appalling for small-scale and start-up companies that depend mostly on seasonal sales. Software maintenance costs for a car rental management system can be divided into software upgradability and technical product support.

To take full advantage of automation for your web-based car reservation system, timely and routine maintenance of the underlying software system is paramount. However, doing this intelligently and selectively can help curb unnecessary maintenance costs.

Take note of these six useful ways to reduce the maintenance costs for your car rental management system for the long road ahead.

Selectively Reset the Existing Car Rental Management System Features

This involves resetting your existing car rental management system to reduce the costs of annual support and maintenance. Migrating from a legacy system to a whole new innovative platform is great. But, it’s important to sit through and understand which functionalities need to be upgraded or changed and which need to stay as they are.

For example, if you are operating only in one location or country, the localization feature can be written off from your software upgrade. Investing in asocial media integrations would be more useful to promote your business globally.

Invest in a Functional CMMS

Computerized maintenance management software solutions help car rental businesses with analytical capabilities through instant report generation on workflows and asset utilization while providing key metrics on business performance. 

Maintenance reports help you understand where revenue leakage is happening or if you are investing more in unnecessary software maintenance activities while leaving significant issues unattended (like information security).

Proactive Security Upgrades

This means engaging security mechanisms before security incidents happen. Timely upgrades to security patches will ensure that critical failures don’t affect your system. Critical security failures can affect the health of your car reservation system and make it more vulnerable to information and security attacks.

This can cost your business dearly since information loss, customer information misuse, sensitive data access, financial information visibility, and more would be the results of not performing timely and critical security upgrades.

Relicense Your Car Rental Management System

This is one way of reducing maintenance costs for your enterprise system. When unintentionally costs spike up, many rental companies opt to relicense their car rental software. It is like a new opportunity to do away with the mistakes you have done earlier.

The ideal way of doing this would be to start off for a minimum amount of time before relicensing completely. This is a step-by-step approach and needs careful calibration. Though this is time-consuming, it guarantees minimized maintenance costs in the future. Many car rental companies have saved over 40% of their maintenance costs by following this approach.

Outsource to a Cloud-Based Maintenance Service Provider

The advantage of moving to the cloud is that you can outsource some or all of your system maintenance activities to professionals that provide maintenance software as a service. What this means is that the service provider will maintain the outsourced functionalities for your system for a subscription fee, which is usually very nominal compared to the costs of maintaining your car reservation system by yourself.

You may need to hire an expensive maintenance expert even if there is no maintenance work to be done. With a SaaS provider, you do not have to explicitly invest in the tools, hardware, resources, or infrastructure needed to maintain your car rental management system. Also, the chances of errors, security problems, or additional costs are reduced significantly because of the professional services and Service-level agreements involved. The savings in maintenance costs by adopting this option range from 25% to 60%. 

Ideal Maintenance Provider Allocation

This is another technique where they switch software tools or service suppliers to more cost-efficient ones. The software maintenance marketplace is replete with freelancers or part-time software maintenance experts who would provide professional services at later stages or for insignificant features of maintenance for your car rental management software.

 

When the data on your system grows, it is necessary to ensure that maintenance is planned ahead and in phases. You can engage different suppliers or maintenance professionals for each stage to ensure that you are not overspending for insignificant or low-criticality maintenance operations. 

Wrapping up

Maintenance is a necessary evil, and not investing in it is an unwise thing to do. However, we hope the tips mentioned above and carefully planning the maintenance activities can waive off overhead costs. 

Talk to a system maintenance expert before you invest in maintenance resources and activities to understand the best optimization processes that will support budget control.

Read other insightful blogs from us that could help your car rental business perform better and stay competent.