Q: How do I share vehicles between locations?
If you have multiple locations and your vehicles frequently move between them, you may end up with a surplus of vehicles at some locations and be unable to meet demand at others. As such, RCM has various ways of managing the sharing of vehicle between your different locations.
Availability Engine: If you have the Availability Engine setup in your system, it has various rules and additional features to manage this. These features include those mentioned below and several more including Placeholder Bookings, overriding location restrictions for far future bookings and temporary vehicle sharing rules. For more information, please see the Availability Engine - Vehicle Sharing Between Locations and Options to Share Vehicles Between Locations. If you do not have the Availability Engine, you can use the below processes to control vehicle sharing.
Turn-Around Gaps: Firstly, before any vehicles can be shared between locations, you must first set up Turnaround Gaps. This specifies the length of time after a vehicle has been dropped-off before it can be hired out again, and it's supposed to cover the time required to relocate the vehicle, clean it, perform an inspection, and prepare it for its next hire. Even if you are not sharing vehicles between locations, you need to establish the Turnaround Hours required between two bookings at the same location. For more information, please see the Turn-around Hours article. Included in this article are details about the 5 system parameters that manage Turnaround Hour Functionality.
Allocation Parameters: Then you will need to specify which vehicles new Bookings can be created for and unallocated booking can be allocated against, using these below system parameters found in System Setup >> System Parameters >> Booking Process Parameters.
- If both are set to NO, then a booking can be allocated to a vehicle at any location, so long as there is the set Turnaround gap between the vehicles last drop-off date and this booking's pickup.
- If the first is set to Yes, and the second No, then a booking can be allocated to any vehicles whose last drop-off was in the same region as this bookings Pickup Location, so long as there is the set Turnaround gap between the vehicles last drop-off date and this booking's pickup. Please see the Regional Locations article for more information on how to set up these regions.
- If the second is set to Yes, then a booking can only be allocated to a vehicle whose last drop-off was at the same location as this booking's pickup.
Note: The first two options allow for vehicles to be shared between different locations. However, it does not actually record the movement of the vehicle between locations in the gap between bookings, so we suggest that you mark this with a Maintenance or Non-Revenue booking.
Manually Moving Vehicle: In situations where you have a surplus of vehicles at one location and a deficit at another, you may want to manually move a few vehicles between these two locations. This can be done by creating a Non-Revenue or Maintenace booking, and anytime after this, these vehicles will now be available in the new location.
Vehicle Master Locations: These master locations only apply if you are using the Availability Engine or the Stop Sale. They are used to shows that two or more locations are close enough to each other that they can easily and constantly share vehicles, and so the Stop Sale Availability Check or the Availability Engine will treat them like a single location. For information on Stop Sale, please see the Setting Up Stop Sale - Live Availability article.
Important Articles
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