Context and challenge

Budget Rent-a-Car is a leading rental car company operating across the globe. We did an audit for Budget Mexico with the goal of improving their customer experience and their global management software.

The company had encountered a number of issues with their existing ERP solution and asked us to suggest solutions. For instance, the website's system was different from the company's ERP software which led to some discrepancies in actual car availability, options availability, or business metrics. This impacted both the customers’ experience, as well as the staffs’ ability to perform.

The current ERP solution

The current management software was an old Windows application with a poor user interface. There was no consistency or a presence of information hierarchy. Functionalities were likely added over time wherever there was space and usability as a second thought. As a result, the learning curve for the staff was huge, error rates high, and part of the interface was both unused and unknown to the team.

Audit and research insights

Despite a bad interface, the system was packed with functionality that the staff were able to handle the daily operations. It was interesting to see that people will adapt to any system that they are given and make the best of it regardless of major inefficiencies.
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Our team travelled to Mexico for a week to do an in-depth audit and hear from the staff themselves. This included briefing us on any issues they were experiencing and what they would like to improve. We went department by department to observe and listen.

Some of the main issues were:‍

• Unexpected added costs to the customer when arriving at the counter, leading to frustrations.
  
• A lot of sections and fields were not used by the employees and/or understood entirely. The “Notes” section often had coded information about the reservation that was not clear and that employees hardly understood.
  
• Repetitive tasks, for example, the entry of same information in different sections.
  
• The use of external spreadsheets that the current software had not fulfilled in terms of needs.
  
• Lack of both accurate and live reporting.
  
• No CRM to keep track of customers
• Solving lack of features by adding other applications which led to more work, duplicated tasks, and integration issues.
  
• Time wasted looking for information and making additional spreadsheets.
  

Part of my work was to do an inventory of the current functionality and improve upon the information architecture and hierarchy. I then identified the main groups in each screen which could then be re-organized in a more logical way.

Proposal

We recognized the huge amount of work and that building a better system could take years. In these situations, the best strategy is to start with a small pilot in one location that will run parallel to the usual system and grow as needed.
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We decided to improve the check in / checkout process as a first project, as well as suggesting a refactor of the technical backend.

Fleet inventory

The current system did not have any live inventory capability. In comparison, the new fleet inventory view makes it easy for everyone to understand the current status. It can also be presented to customers on tablets as a way to improve interaction and engagement.

Reservation list

This view of upcoming reservations makes it easy to assess the daily workload as well as informing the staff about reservation status.

Single reservation view

This new Reservation page includes the same functionality as the older one but everything is organized in a logical and linear way, making it much easier to use.

Contracts

The contracts are organized in a similar way to Reservations.

Single contract view

Results

The proposal was very well received and in line with the company's goals to improve their management software. Along with this redesign we offered a complete change of technology towards a future-proof and cloud-based system. Due to other factors, the company delayed the implementation of this transition.