Turn Data Into Direction
Table of Contents
West Wallasey Car Hire runs every stage of its fleet’s life on Syrinx, from buying a vehicle to selling it. On busy days, its team books and delivers as many as 200 vans, and at month-end it sends about 15,000 invoices.
22,000 vans and cars. Up to 200 deliveries a day. 15,000 invoices at month-end. One system behind all of it.
Operations
Long-term, flexible van and car rental across the UK
Fleet
About 22,000 vans and cars
Team
About 350 employees, including 130 part-time delivery and collection drivers
“We really like you. It does what it says on the tin.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
Background: West Wallasey Car Hire
West Wallasey has rented vehicles since 1974 and has stayed family-owned the whole time. The company rents vans and cars to utilities, major infrastructure projects, housing maintenance firms, and public sector organizations, and customers can keep a vehicle as long as they need it. Many of its vans are built to the customer’s spec and finished in the customer’s livery.
Maria Foulkes, West Wallasey’s IT manager, spent 30 years working for a rental software company before she joined West Wallasey and, as she says, knows hire “very, very well.”
The Challenge: Outgrowing the Old System
When Foulkes joined West Wallasey, her job was to replace the software the company had outgrown. The team looked at several systems and chose Syrinx.
“My job was to bring another product in because we’d outgrown it. We looked at several products, but Syrinx [ticked] all the boxes.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
The Solution: The Full Vehicle Lifecycle in One System
Today, Syrinx tracks every vehicle in the fleet from the day West Wallasey buys it to the day it’s sold.
“Syrinx handles the journey from acquisition of the vehicle to disposal of the vehicle and all the bits in between, servicing and rental and notes. Syrinx handles all of that.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
At West Wallasey’s volume, getting every booking right matters. The 12 people in the hire room can take as many as 200 bookings in a day, and the company can deliver that many. Each booking passes through three teams. One takes the booking, a second assigns a vehicle registration, and a third checks the rate, site, and spec. Only then is the booking confirmed in Syrinx.
“What we love about Syrinx is the confirm process. You’ve got unconfirmed and confirmed. It allows us to have a level of QA [on] our rental process.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
Invoicing runs at the same scale. At month-end, West Wallasey sends about 15,000 invoices. One customer rents 3,000 vehicles, and its invoice alone runs 200 pages.
“Syrinx is great. It’s really, really good. It does invoices very, very well. The girls in invoicing, they get that done in under three hours, which is great.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
In the field, delivery drivers use the Syrinx Driver app. About 80 of the company’s 130 part-time drivers work on any given day. Customers still sign paper delivery forms, and drivers photograph the signed forms in the app so the office sees them right away.
“The guys will process the job on the app. They’ll start the job, so we know they’re on their way. They’ve got the ability to capture an image, [so they] take a picture of the paperwork as well, so that we can see it immediately, the signature. And that works well for us.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
The app also shows the dispatch office where every driver is, so the team can see at a glance who is heading out on a delivery and who is on the way back from a collection.
“We’re tracking our drivers on the Syrinx app, so we know where they are.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
The Results: A System That Does What It Says
West Wallasey has its full rental history, damage notes, and sales records in Syrinx, and its team runs its own reports straight from the database.
“We do great reporting out of it.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
The company is moving to new servers now, and Foulkes expects month-end invoicing to drop from under three hours to about 90 minutes.
Asked what she would tell another rental company considering Syrinx, Foulkes kept it simple.
“It’s very intuitive.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
“Generally, we like it. It’s a good product. It does what it says it will do.”
Maria Foulkes, IT Manager, West Wallasey Car Hire
About West Wallasey Car Hire
West Wallasey Car Hire, which trades as West Wallasey Fleethire Services, is a family business that has rented vehicles in the UK since 1974. It specializes in long-term, flexible van rental and supplies light commercial vehicles and cars, many built to the customer’s spec, to utilities, infrastructure projects, housing maintenance firms, and the public sector. Learn more at westwallasey.com.
About Point of Rental
Point of Rental started as a rental store in Grand Prairie, Texas, in 1982. When the software available at the time couldn’t handle the rental business, the founders, a group of former NASA software engineers, wrote their own in 1983. More than 40 years later, Point of Rental builds the Rental Performance System that serves more than 6,000 rental businesses in more than 80 countries, from offices in Fort Worth, Texas; Reading, England; and Melbourne, Australia, drawing on nearly 1,000 years of combined hands-on rental experience across its team.
Running a large fleet? See how Syrinx gives your team one system for bookings, invoicing, and drivers in the field, just like West Wallasey.
