Aptean Equipment ERP

The goal with Aptean Equipment ERP is to provide a 90-95% out-of-the-box fit for the equipment distributor customers. They achieve this by providing tailored, configurable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that meets the specific industry needs of equipment dealers. A high degree of business fit means lower-risk, lower-cost implementation and greater user adoption. Below are the main product areas of Aptean Equipment ERP.

Product Areas

Product areas of Aptean Equipment ERP include:

Service

• Dispatch Board
• Service Contract Management
• Technician Availability
• WIP Order & Labor
• Field Service

Rentals

• Availability Tree
• Rental Contract Management
• Cross Departmental Hub
• Shipping
• Billing
• Fleet Management
• Logistics/Warehousing

Sales

• Sales Orders
• Integration with Service & Purchase Orders
• Logistics/Warehousing
• Lease Management
• Trade-ins
• CRM

Parts

• Inventory Management
• Replenishment
• Manufacturer Parts

Equipment Management

• Transfers
• History
• Warranty Management
• Component & Attachment Management

Financials and Reporting

• Financials
• Reporting
• Costing

Equipment Management

The procedure of tracking and managing equipment is core to the operations of a dealership, with clear implications for rentals, parts, service and sales aspects of your business.

Transfers

• Users can fully control movement between new equipment, used equipment, and rental fleet. For example, moving rental units into used for sale. Change of ownership is also tracked as equipment moves.

History

• Entire history of equipment stays with the piece of equipment forever – from purchase to rental to sale to repurchase, etc.

Warranty Management

• The capability to track warranty claims against specific equipment.

Component & Attachment Management

• The capability to manage serialized cabs, engines, forks, etc.

Financials and Reporting

Financials are the backbone of any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The Financials, Reporting and Costing functionality within Aptean Equipment ERP will provide real-time visibility into the state of your business, allow you to gain greater control, and drive growth at your dealership!

Financials

• General Ledger provides ability to set up a company and post to the general ledger including setup of chart of accounts, general journals, recurring journals, and source codes.
• Full data export to Word or Excel using style sheets and adding links to external documents.
• Allocations, budgeting, account schedules, consolidations, responsibility centers and financial reporting standards, change log, intercompany transactions, dimension, bank reconciliation, and multi-currency support.
• Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable are integrated with General Ledger and Inventory.
• Support for Electronic Funds Transfer, printing of MICR encoded checks, positive pay, and other advanced features.

Reporting

• Support for tactical and operational reporting
• Detailed reporting in real-time via Excel reduces users’ learning curve and removes the dependence on IT departments for report writing.
• Easy-to-use report features that integrate Excel functions like charting, pivot tables, and conditional formatting.
• Analytical and Business Intelligence capabilities through Excel or Web-based user interface.

Costing

• Automatic accrual of equipment received but not invoiced.
• Item Charge Assignment functionality allows you to associate related costs against items or documents; handy for freight, duty, storage, and other associated costs.

Parts

As the owner or manager of an equipment dealership, you know that you can never be short of a part needed by a customer; that’s why parts management software needs to be a part of your business system so you can stay on top of inventory, replenishment, and other vital issues. Parts may be small in comparison to equipment, but they have big impact on profitability!

Inventory Management

• Ability to upload vendor parts catalogs.
• Physical inventory capabilities – automates the running journals that print off cycle count sheets for the warehouse.
• Ability to maintain and track supersedes --part A replaced by part B; functionality allows you to link them together and prompts you to use up part A first.
• Safety stock level fields for all parts; ability to calculate what the safety stock levels should be based on average calls or days supply.
• Manage obsolescence by having the system automatically change part statuses at a location based on conditions such as aging and movement.
• The ability to manage and track cores with customers and suppliers.

Replenishment

• Ability to set different stocking levels of parts by branch or location or van.
• The capability for MRP planning (supply methodology) – run work sheets looks at quantity of parts on hand.
• Ability to easily transfer parts between branches

Manufacturer Parts

• Price tapes from manufacturers can be imported directly into the Equip-Soft system (all the costs, pricing, and does automatic calculating).
• Handle parts from different manufacturers with ease.

Rentals

If rentals are a key component of your equipment dealership, you need instant visibility of available rentable equipment, with robust functionality that works easily with purchasing, service, parts, inventory, and other aspects of your business. Whether you offer one-off rentals or full fleet management, you can effectively manage fleet utilization in order to maximize profitability with Aptean Equipment ERP Rentals–a tightly integrated module that includes many intuitive features.

Availability Tree

• The sortable availability tree within the Aptean Equipment ERP software lets users filter by equipment type, model, manufacturer, location, capacity, fleet size, what is on rent, etc.

Rental Contract Management

• Contracts or quotes can be generated for customers with one click right from the availability tree.
• Quotes can be converted to rental contracts (partial or completed) with the system keeping track of those won or lost, recording the reasons for both results.
• Serialized and non-serialized items can be on the same rental contract, if desired.
• Training is efficient with rental contract “wizards” (pop-up windows) that guide users through all the steps required for creating a contract.
• Rental contracts inter-relate with required service work, such as pre-delivery inspections, check-in inspections, etc.
• Service orders created from rental contracts are updated automatically in Service Dispatch.
• A rental exchange wizard walks users through the steps needed to find replacement equipment for customers.
• At the end of a rental contract, the end of contract wizard helps the user finalize the charges, including adjustments for mid-period return as well as any additional charges such as pickup, damages, etc.
• User can cancel the entire contract or selected units within that contract.

Cross Departmental Hub

• Service (work orders), purchasing and other day-to-day functions can be performed right within the rentals module.
• Strong integration with evaluation information your employees use every day – such as current book value, profitability for period to date, year to date, lifetime to date, etc.
• Data can be exported to Microsoft Excel, allowing for more time analyzing information by your employees.
• Earned and accrued rental income is easily and quickly calculated in an analysis schedule to allow for accurate financial reporting.

Shipping

• Warehouse shipment is automatically generated, with availability status updated accordingly.
• Units can be returned to the originating branch or to a different branch.

Billing

• The next billing, if desired, can automatically move from daily to weekly to monthly, depending on the most advantageous rate for the customer.
• Rental contracts, and resultant invoices, can be set to automatically add applicable charges – by customer or by equipment category – for insurance, delivery and pickup charges, etc.

Fleet Management

• Can manage fleet sizes from under 100 units to 30,000 or more.
• Improved and simplified fleet maintenance.
• Comprehensive fleet and asset utilization details.
• Minimized or eliminated paperwork.
• Enhanced quality of information available to share with customers.

Logistics/Warehousing

• Users can concentrate equipment receipts, shipments, and transfers under a single Logistics/Warehousing function.

Sales

If equipment sales are a key component of your business, you need specific sales functionality that integrates tightly to the other aspects of your equipment distribution business. Your employees need to be able to perform many day-to-day operations right within the system’s sales module; such is the case in the Equip-Soft software.

Sales Orders

• The sales order is the hub of the sales system; users can create and view most documents from there, and navigate from the sales order to other parts of the Aptean Equipment ERP system.
• An automated approval request can be emailed to designated employees regarding a sales order or quote, if desired. Then the requester receives an email that the transaction is approved or rejected.
• Users can easily convert quotes to sales orders; all details from the quote follow the order.
• The ability to keep track of lost and changed quotes.

Integration With Service & Purchase Orders

• Automatic generation of the service work order and purchase order, if needed, from the sales order, such as for pre-delivery inspection service tickets, etc.
• Upon receipt of equipment, the purchase order will automatically create the applicable equipment record(s).
• Service orders can be capitalized or expensed to the unit worked on.
• Cost of sales will automatically adjust for service orders capitalized after sale of the unit.

Logistics/Warehousing

• Consolidate all equipment pickups, deliveries and transfers into a single planning sheet.
• Schedule and dispatch transportation/logistics runs.
• Manage paperwork via logistics document packages.

Lease Management

• Accounting functionality to properly record sales type lease arrangements.
• Utilize a built-in lease calculator to define types of leases, lease rates and maintenance rates.
• Order equipment and generate recurring lease/maintenance billing contracts.
• Manage accounting schedules or sales type lease arrangement.

Trade-Ins

• Equipment order screen allows for management of trade-ins: User enters make, model, value of equipment, and allowance value for the sale.

CRM

• Opportunity management and campaign management to help your sales people get the most from marketing opportunities.
• Access to customer and work order histories, parts availability, and delivery schedules.
• Integration of contact information to smartphones so there is no lag time in contacting prospects and customers.
• Sales management has immediate visibility into sales activities to make faster, better decisions.

Service

You need to maximize all the efficiencies you can in the relatively high-margin area of servicing, which is growing in demand by your customers and prospects. Accurate assessment of your technicians and other resources, quick dispatch, field service, and full visibility into work orders are provided by the functionality in Aptean Equipment ERP software, including integration with CRM and mobile technologies for superlative customer service.

Dispatch Board

• Service manager dispatches all service requests to technicians. Requests are entered into the Aptean Equipment ERP system; can be filtered by type of requests, by customers, equipment, etc.
• Can customize visibility of the dispatch board, depending on roles set up.
• Robust functionality: all task scheduling done in a single screen.

Service Contract Management

• Covers both contract maintenance billing and planned maintenance, which can be run together, or run separately to manage two different processes.
• Users can enter the contract with a customer to do service cycles, for example monthly or every 90 days, or can be done on hour/meter readings, instead.
• Service Planning Worksheet – one-click to run this worksheet, which will suggest the service work orders that need to be created based on your contracts.
• Automatically generates all service orders, which then show up in the Dispatch Board to schedule technicians.

Technician Availability

• Ability to view the availability of all technicians on staff – can view by day, week, month, quarter, and year.
• Unlimited number of technicians can be accessed in this view.
• Tech can be allocated to a job from the availability view.
• Can pull up all the service work orders allocated to each technician directly from this availability view.

WIP Order & Labor

• Full visibility into what service orders are still open.
• Visibility into how much technicians’ time is left to be allocated per service order, to maximize billing time.

Field Service

• Access mobile work orders, customizable, coded PM, parts and inventory tracking, warranty tracking, timekeeping, customer data, today’s schedule, etc.
• Capture performance data of employees – service time, tasks, expenses, etc.
• Integration with MobileFrame that allows for easy development of custom mobile applications.
• Integration with telemetry services, such as SpeedShield, for meter readings on equipment and other functionality.