05.09.2010

United adopts pricing system

US based rental company United Rentals is employing pricing information systems from Zilliant, of Austin Texas to help it improve its pricing and margins.

The company has already implemented the Zilliant Margin Maximizer and Margin Insight solution across its 550 locations. And is planning to adopt Zilliant's Margin Manager from early 2011.

United Rentals says it adopted the programmes to improve the quality and accuracy of customer rental rates to maximize its return on assets.

Margin Maximizer is said to “optimise prices and minimise over-discounting in the field, to drive dramatic improvements to operating margins, while its analytics counterpart, Margin Insight, delivers deep visibility into over-discounting patterns, quoting errors, cross-selling opportunities and off-invoice margin erosion.

Michael Kneeland, chief executive of United Rentals said: “As the market leader, we sought to employ a tool that could offer us a rigorous pricing methodology to support our customer segmentation strategy and increase the effectiveness of our sales force. We selected Zilliant because the company has demonstrated success with their price segmentation and statistical scientific software technology that specifically addresses the pricing challenges we face every day.”