Products

Our core product

Our core product is Era, a leading edge vehicle rental system.

Era has been built from scratch by Fourth Tier Solutions' highly skilled development team. It manages to combine powerful and intuitive point of sale features with sophisticated rental management functionality to provide a rich rental environment.

Our use of innovative designs and the latest technology provide an unparalleled user and customer experience whilst still retaining the principal values required by a rental organisation.

Era's advanced system architecture and intelligent design provides a secure, scalable and flexible environment at an affordable price.

By helping you to move your business forward Era can add real value, bring dynamic, competitive advantage and future proof your systems investment.

Era - Tomorrows intelligence, today!

The need

Restricted system choice requires compromise
Traditionally, when selecting a rental system the choice has had to be between a large corporate based solution or one designed for small licensee or private operations. This decision is usually based on the size of the business. By restricting the choice of systems, the limitations each type contains have to be accepted as part of a best-fit solution.

These systems are generally expensive to maintain and extend - small systems due to local customisation and larger corporate systems due to their inherent complexity and older technology.

The key requirements for an ideal solution
An ideal system will take the best features of both these solutions and eliminate their weaknesses.

• It will encapsulate all the functionality of a rental operation in an intuitive and easy to use graphical interface.
• It will reduce costs and maximise revenue.
• It will incorporate the latest technology while remaining cost effective.
• It will be flexible and dynamic.
• It must provide a superior customer experience with flexible rate and payment handling and accurate billing.
• It must track vehicles through their entire life cycle.
• It must provide detailed reporting and secure system integration.
• It must be able to grow with your business.
• It must future proof your investment.

The solution

The catalyst
Our many years in the vehicle rental industry has seen us undertake numerous projects investigating and implementing rental solutions for both corporate and licensee environments. In this time, not once did we come across a system that could truly provide for the many diverse needs of the rental industry. Having seen attempts to shoehorn existing systems into these rental operations one thing became clear to us. The only way to deliver a truly enterprise level solution capable of providing a clear business advantage to organisations of any size or structure would be to build one from scratch.

Best for all environments
Fourth Tier Solutions has dedicated the last two years to creating a solution that combines all the best features of both small independent and large corporate systems whilst eradicating their obvious limitations. By doing this, independent or licensee operations can reap the benefits their size has traditionally denied them while still maintaining their individuality, whilst large corporates can maintain their consistent image and status while achieving a level of agility previously unavailable to them.

Independence breeds quality
Unlike most systems developed for this industry, we have never been under the instruction of a specific client. We have used our considerable rental experience along with regular presentations to the international rental industry to ensure we always take the most appropriate design decisions.

By maintaining our independence, our exceptionally high quality standards have never been compromised at any stage. This has enabled us to produce a system of the highest quality, using the latest technology and incorporating all the features you would wish to see in a rental system but without the cost penalties this often incurs.

A new Era
The result is Era, a totally revolutionary product that still manages to incorporate all the traditional requirements of a rental business.

Key benefits

Real added value
Maximise revenue at the counter by utilising Era's powerful point of sale features.

Dynamic competitive advantage
Quickly set up new marketing and sales initiatives using Era's highly flexible management tools.

Outstanding customer experience
Use the highly intuitive, one screen rental process to create an outstanding rental experience for your customers.

Future proofed investment
Highly advanced, scalable design delivered on leading edge technology with a simple upgrade path.

Cost effective deployment
Era has a flexible deployment strategy to suit all your business models and location configurations.

Key features

Era grows with your business
Era can scale from a single user up to thousands of users enabling it to grow as your business does. Whether you are a single site rental operation or you have hundreds of sites spanning many countries, Era will provide for all your rental system needs so future proofing your IT investment.

One central system
Due to the enterprise nature of the design, an entire rental organisation can be deployed centrally on one system whilst maintaining total individual security. It can accommodate multiple countries consisting of both corporate and franchisee operations enabling all participating locations to run from one central database. This provides many advantages for large corporations down to individual licensees including improved information sharing and a reduction in data duplication and cost.

Leading edge technology
We have incorporated the latest technology in order to enjoy the competitive benefits this provides but without suffering the cost penalties this often incurs.

Agile design
Era is extremely agile, enabling it to react quickly to the dynamic conditions in the rental market. The operator who can act quickest in a changing market can usually gain a big competitive advantage.

Transform the system to your requirements
Our data driven design allows you to configure most aspects of the system yourself. This greatly reduces your reliance on us, which in turn reduces your costs and allows you to implement business driven changes far more quickly. In addition, where a system change is required, it is usually much simpler and quicker for us to implement.

Fast rental process
We have created a windows based user-interface that is unique, intuitive and very easy to use, promoting an extremely fast rental process. Many intellisense features are included to maximise the productivity of your counter staff.

Highly intuitive, one screen rentals
The user interface is designed for simplicity and flexibility which has resulted in an extremely intuitive user experience. Virtually all rental functions, from reservation to rental close are performed using the same screen. Mandatory and restricted fields can be easily configured for many different user groups using the powerful rules engine. Many intellisense features have been utilised to ensure that the users, and therefore the customers, have a far more enjoyable rental experience.

Online information
Invaluable information such as reservation manifests, due back and delivery and collection schedules, daily, weekly and monthly activity reports and future availability predictions are instantly available online. These combine with our standard reporting modules to provide an accurate picture of your rental operations.

Powerful search engine
Era has an extremely simple yet hugely powerful search engine. Its intuitive interface allows you to quickly find rentals, customers, vehicles, locations or whatever else you might need regardless of the volumes of information stored in the system. Extensive drill down functionality allows you to immediately display vehicle and renter history and location hierarchies.

Superior customer experience
Era provides a superior customer experience to attract new business, retain it and create positive referrals. The flexible customer engine has been designed to enable huge amounts of individual data to be held. This data has been made fully searchable in an extremely intuitive manner enabling simple customer retrieval and reduced data duplication. Full rental history tracking, preferred options, multi-lingual printing and customer rating combine to provide a rich customer experience.

Information at your fingertips
By condensing the vast amounts of accurate and detailed information Era can store into a one-screen rental process we provide an extremely sophisticated yet simple environment for your users to work in. Additional details on nearly all aspects of the rental process are never more than one screen away providing an amazing rental experience and making even your newest members of staff feel like experts.

Flexible rate handling
We have developed a hugely powerful rates engine that is capable of accurately creating all your required rates and associated charges. Our intuitive point-of-sale tool allows you to automatically prompt staff to sell items and offer them incentives for doing so. It gives you the control to ensure your staff are quoting and charging exactly the right rates whilst still allowing them the flexibility to close the deal thereby maximising revenue at the counter.

Yield management
By combining sophisticated on-line reporting with our powerful rates engine we make it simple for you to reduce costs, increase utilisation and maximise your revenue.

Flexible account creation
Era has a hierarchical customer engine, allowing accounts to be setup and linked to all their associated divisions and on down to employee level. Rich details can be held against all these records allowing a complete and accurate picture to be built up of all your customers. Of course the accounts link directly into the rates engine to ensure your customers can receive tailored rates where you decide it is appropriate.

Accurate customer billing
The powerful rates engine built into Era allows accurate rates and charges to be configured for all your customer requirements. You can define payment restrictions for any charge / payment type combination to ensure accurate split billing takes place between any number of parties.

Flexible payment options
Any number of payment types can be taken for a rental as defined by you. Completely customisable validation routines are used to ensure accurate data entry and avoid time wasted on processing bad data. Credit cards can be swiped to identify customers, speed up processing and improve accuracy and a link can be provided to a designated credit card acquirer to automate authorisations and payments.

Multiple Currencies
Era is fully enabled to handle multiple currencies, including the euro, both in rates quoted and payments received.

Total fleet control
Era provides detailed fleet tracking through all the phases of a unit's life cycle from planning to disposal. The built-in transactional control ensures the integrity of all vehicle movements and our advanced blocking utilities ensure vehicles are not rented past their return dates. Our unique fleet installation and maintenance tools provide an extremely fast and efficient way of managing your fleet.

Powerful reporting tool
A combination of our powerful location hierarchy, rich data capture and advanced reporting tools provide an extremely powerful reporting engine. The capability to drill down through hierarchies enables reports to be created at any level. You can also design your own reports and export them to Microsoft Excel using our special reporting wizard.

Reduced maintenance
Throughout the system we have incorporated data inheritance features and sophisticated wizards to ensure user maintenance is kept to a minimum. By reducing the volume of information that needs to be entered and the time it takes to do so we can increase the accuracy of the data and keep expensive and wasteful administration costs to a minimum.

Reduced training costs
The single screen rental concept and natural data entry flow combine with the simple information pop-ups and many intellisense features to produce a very quick and easy training environment. Reducing training times and costs can be extremely important especially in areas where staff turnover can be relatively high.

Secure Transactions
Our advanced system architecture and intelligent design ensures that all rental transactions and vehicle movements are securely saved to the database. We ensure partial details are never recorded when a system problem occurs, a common cause of lost vehicles, incorrect billing and bad customer information.

Extensive integration
Our choice of technology and highly optimised, open design allows Era to be integrated with virtually any other systems. Our accounts interface contains a flexible scheduling utility allowing us to easily integrate with any compliant, third party accounting systems. We can integrate into corporate reservation systems, blacklists, corporate accounts and bad renter files. Our export facility also allows you to pull data into popular office packages such as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Business to Business computing
Our open design and leading edge technology allow us to provide business-to-business (B2B) communications using the latest XML and web service standards. This helps to reduce costs and increase timesavings when dealing with your suppliers and promote an enhanced image and flexible communication with your customers.

CTI
Another advantage of our sophisticated design and architecture is our ability to integrate with third party systems such as private telephone exchanges to provide computer telephony integration (CTI). This is especially useful in a call centre environment when call times and customer routing is especially important.