Nationwide Rental Car Company Shaves 40% off wireless invoices

Industry Background

Rental car company employees are more often than not mobile while examining cars, performing deliveries and pickups, and being in a myriad of other places besides their desks. The employees’ effectiveness and efficiency depends on cell phones. Employee management depends on cell phones. With cell phones in wide use, their costs represent a larger share of company expenses.

Nationwide Rental Car Company

A regional group of a national rental car company realized that not only was cost management out of control for cellular devices, but also order management. With so many wireless devices, they needed a wireless management solution to provide the necessary technology tools and assistance to monitor the procurement of new devices and track their monthly spending. After evaluating several options, including relying on the carrier for some of those services, they selected MobilSentry™ by MobilSense.

The Problem

This regional group was struggling to manage their distributed offices. Each region managed their cellular phones and they were unable to stay on top of the usage and rate plans for optimal cost. They primarily used Sprint, Verizon and AT&T phones. Sprint provided a recommendation for pooling but without a solution that retained local expense and rate management, the approach did not match their organizational needs. They were seeking an automated solution that left control at the local level while minimizing overall costs. They also expressed a desire to outsource provisioning and help desk in order to free up internal resources.

The MobilSense Solution

They selected MobilSentry™ from MobilSense including Policy Supervisor and Order Manager. MobilSense assisted in consolidating all of the accounts to one Billing Account Number (BAN) permitting the creation of one pool across all of the offices. They are using the pooling adjusted capability of MobilSentry™ to assign cost to each office equitably based on an office’s percent of pool usage. Billing summary and individual bill detail is available online to each local office monthly. Through this solution the regional group has been able to allow local offices to participate in the approval process of rate and feature changes as well as spot unused and lost devices for standby or termination. Abuse and overuse cases are presented monthly to local offices for corrective action.

To improve efficiency and free up internal resources, all orders are placed online through the Order Manager module of MobilSentry™ and all Help Desk questions are directed to MobilSense for resolution.

By using online provisioning they are now more efficiently able to re-use spare devices and services to further reduce costs. Also available now are reports on ordering activity and costs which were previously not easily available through the carriers.

The Results

Restructuring and maintaining the optimal pool size have trimmed the monthly invoices of $104,000 down to $62,000. All of this has been achieved while preserving local autonomy and control. The total savings over 7 years of using MobilSentry™ are now over $5M, representing over $700,000/year in savings on an average wireless count of 1,300 devices.

I Would Like to Learn More