Turn Data Into Direction
Table of Contents
Almost 500 current and former customers joined Point of Rental CEO Wayne Harris for a live webinar, “A Conversation on Vision and Strategy: The Road Ahead at Point of Rental.” Harris used the session to walk attendees through the company’s new brand, explain the thinking behind it, and demo the product driving it: Rental Intelligence Suite. Here’s a recap of what he covered, plus highlights from the audience Q&A.
Why Point of Rental Rebranded
Harris opened by explaining that the rebrand didn’t start with a logo. “The more important question was, what should the Point of Rental brand say about who we are today and where we’re going?” he said.
To answer that, he compared the company then and now. When Point of Rental introduced its previous brand in 2016, it had about 50 employees, one office in Grand Prairie, Texas, and two primary products, Enterprise (now Expert) and Cloud. Enterprise received one major update a year, accompanied by release notes Harris joked “felt like a little bit of a novel.”
Today, Point of Rental has roughly 400 employees, offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and five product families: Essentials, Elite, Syrinx, Record360, and the newest, Rental Intelligence Suite. A third of the RER 100 largest equipment rental companies in North America trust Point of Rental, and almost 70% of the largest event rental companies use its software every day.
“We did not simply grow the old Point of Rental,” Harris said. “We are now a fundamentally different technology partner for the rental industry.” What hasn’t changed, he added, are the company’s roots in rental, its focus on customers first, and its commitment to innovation, a commitment reflected in nine RER Most Innovative Technology awards over the last 10 years.
“A brand should tell the truth about the company behind it,” Harris said. “Our previous brand could no longer tell the whole truth about Point of Rental.”
From Rental Management to Rental Performance
Harris traced his own roots in the industry back to age 11, working at his grandfather’s rental store, where he learned to fix equipment other people depended on. Over the four decades since, he’s watched paper become software, local systems become cloud platforms, and data become one of the industry’s most valuable assets.
But through most of that evolution, he said, rental software has been asked to do one job: hold and organize information. “The system held the data. You did the work,” Harris said.
To show how that’s changing, Harris played a short film built around the idea of rental performance. The video argued that digitizing rental data didn’t automatically produce better decisions. It just produced more data, “all of it valuable, and all of it collecting dust because the data was never the hard part. Doing something with it is.”
The video introduced Rental Performance as what comes after rental management: a system that doesn’t just store information but watches the business, flags what needs attention and increasingly acts on it. It closed with the line Point of Rental is now building its brand around: “Performance is the point.”
The Three Pillars of Rental Performance
Back on camera, Harris laid out the three pillars that make up the Rental Performance System, or RPS:
| Pillar | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Operation Performance | Helps run the business by watching the operation in real time and surfacing what’s slipping, whether that’s an idle asset, a maintenance issue or a missed follow-up |
| Decision Performance | Helps people make bigger, less frequent calls, like what to buy, sell or invest in, using predictions and market context instead of gut feel alone |
| Execution Performance | Multiplies what a team can get done by letting software and supervised agents complete work directly, so a business can grow without adding headcount at the same rate |
“These are not rigid buckets,” Harris noted. “A capability can improve more than one dimension, and that overlap is a real strength.”
A Live Look at Rental Intelligence Suite
Rental Intelligence Suite is Point of Rental’s proof point for what a Rental Performance System looks like in practice, and Harris walked through it live.
| Feature | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Lets each user build their own view by typing questions in plain English, rather than waiting on IT or a fixed report |
| Analytics | Drills from a division-level view down to a single serialized asset, with real-time ROI, utilization, hours, and repair cost |
| Fleet Advisor | Forecasts each asset’s revenue, maintenance cost, and utilization roughly 12 months out, using machine learning trained on historical rental data |
| Industry Benchmarks | Compares a fleet against anonymized, peer-group data refreshed weekly, rather than the quarterly cycle common elsewhere |
| Disposition Planner | Flags assets against configurable age, hours, and ROI thresholds and links directly to listing on Bidadoo or a company website |
| Disposition Agent | Automates the planner’s workflow, scanning the fleet daily and routing high-value decisions through an approval queue |
| AI Insights | Delivers a daily, ranked list of top priorities for managers, each with a rationale, estimated impact, and confidence score |
| Customer Analytics | Ranks customers by a priority score built from revenue trend, AR balance, and life cycle status, so reps know who to call first |
| Voice Agent | Answers inbound calls 24/7, recommends equipment from live inventory, builds quotes, and hands off complex calls with full context |
A few moments stood out. On Analytics, Harris emphasized that every calculated metric has an info icon explaining how it was derived: “We don’t want anything to be a black box of AI or machine learning.” On Industry Benchmarks, he noted the underlying data is anonymized and aggregated to meet antitrust and fair use standards. And on the Disposition Planner, he was direct about the payoff: “It’s not just saying, ‘sell this.’ It’s showing you what you’ll get when you sell it.”
Harris also previewed features still to come, including a Disposition Agent extension, fleet-expansion and fleet-balancing planning tools, and expanded support for unserialized and bulk assets to better serve party and event rental businesses.
Audience Q&A
Judy Fort, Point of Rental Director of Global Solution Engineering, closed the session with audience questions. A recap:
Is Rental Intelligence Suite available now, and for which products? Yes. It’s already in use globally and works across all of Point of Rental’s unified products, including Essentials, Syrinx, and Elite.
How will AI change the rental industry over the next five years? Harris pointed to comments from Matt Gaffin, Point of Rental’s head of AI, describing agents that work around the clock on day-to-day operations, freeing rental business owners to focus on strategy rather than low-value tasks.
What will Rental Intelligence Suite cost? Pricing depends on a customer’s existing setup, since Rental Intelligence Suite sits on top of whatever software a business is already using, and it can also be used by businesses not on Point of Rental software. Harris directed attendees to their account managers for a quote.
Does the benchmarking data help set rental rates? Not today. Harris said Point of Rental is watching how ongoing industry litigation around rental rates plays out before building that capability, though benchmarking already shows customers whether their rates fall above or below the industry average.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Rental Performance System?
The Rental Performance System, or RPS, is the category Point of Rental introduced with its rebrand. It describes software built to act on data, not just report it, across three pillars: operation, decision, and execution performance.
Is Rental Intelligence Suite available today?
Yes. Point of Rental said it’s already in use by customers globally and works across Essentials, Syrinx, and Elite as part of the company’s unified products.
How much does Rental Intelligence Suite cost?
Pricing varies based on a customer’s existing Point of Rental setup, and account managers can provide a specific quote.
Can Rental Intelligence Suite be used without other Point of Rental products?
Harris indicated it’s possible for businesses not currently using Point of Rental software, though details would need to be worked out with an account manager.
Does Rental Intelligence Suite set rental rates?
Not currently. Point of Rental is monitoring ongoing industry discussion and litigation around rental rates before adding that capability, though benchmarking today shows how a business’s rates compare to industry averages.
Watch the Webinar
Watch the full session, including the rental performance video, the live product demo, and the Q&A:
Want to see Rental Intelligence Suite for yourself? Learn more about Rental Intelligence Suite.
