Case Studies

The Meetinghouse Companies - Elmhurst, Illinois

Robert Sivek runs a special event design and production company where the pace of customer service leaves no room for error. Inventory management is absolutely critical to The Meetinghouse Companies’ operations – with their 32,000 square foot design center, there's a lot of inventory to manage. A Solutions customer since 1993, Robert initially relied on CounterPro, and now on Enfinity, to track the availability, location and return on investment of thousands of items. In this interview Robert reveals why they trusted their business to Solutions.

Backed by the Strength of Microsoft Windows
For us, Windows is all about the user learning curve. We can train a new employee on Enfinity in hours, instead of days. People already have familiarity with Windows; they know what a graphical interface looks like and how to use the commands.

What’s great about Enfinity is the way it uses all the strong points of the Windows operating system in its applications software. Solutions has built a product that is easily understandable and very intuitive in how it operates. That’s the thing about software – it’s as good as the people behind it, and Solutions has very good people.

Powerful Inventory Management
Our business can be extremely intense in terms of the demands it places on a computer system. Our typical contract is in the $3,000 to $5,000 dollar range, and it’s not unusual for a contract to be $50,000 dollars or more. We have 30-plus employees who use Enfinity to serve our customers. With most rental businesses, you can build a tent a few different ways but essentially a tent is a tent, and tent kits are pretty straightforward. As an event design company working with artistic decor, our kits can be more complicated, to include entire settings with multiple decor components. We rent everything from props and scenic decor to audiovisual equipment and lighting. Inventory is always coming and going.

Enfinity does an amazing job of maintaining our inventory. It gets us where we need to be. We’re pulling the right things from the warehouse, and we get the right inventory on our trucks. You can’t run a rental company in this day and age without that kind of computer tracking.

We often use Enfinity to look up the utilization of an item to decide whether to toss it, replace it or buy more of it. We look at revenue on items non-stop. Enfinity tracks everything; absolutely nothing falls through the cracks. We have complete confidence in the information in the system.

Customer-Oriented Rental Software
Enfinity is the most customer-oriented rental software I’ve ever seen. We’re able to do much more from a marketing point of view using this system. For example, I can enter coupon codes and Enfinity will automatically apply a promotional discount when a coupon is redeemed. When the expiration date comes up, the discount automatically deactivates.

We also use the system to run fun contests for our customers; we did one recently where, if you beat us at ‘rock, paper, scissors’ over the phone, you got a 10 percent discount on your next rental. Everybody who called, won! The system makes it very easy to control these promotions, turn them on and off.

Solutions is the Industry Standard
Solutions software is the industry standard that everyone else aspires to. We look for reliability in our suppliers, especially with something as important as a mission-critical computer system. We know that Solutions isn’t going anywhere. They’ve been around a long time and the ownership is committed to the rental industry.

That was our choice – to trust our business to the industry leader.

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