Multi-location example - one system, multiple locations within

Multi-location example - one shared fleet

If you have multiple rental locations you have a choice about how you use BRM to help manage your business.

Please Note - Multi-Locations is an optional premium feature

This example looks at the case where you've chosen to treat your fleet as global across your whole business.  

This gives you the flexibility to share bikes between locations, or even start a rental from one location, and end at another.

In order to achieve this BRM provides the following features:

• You can specify a list of locations - such as stores that you operate from.   You give them short-codes (and a colour), like they do for international airports - LHR for London Heathrow  LAX for Los Angeles etc
• Each of your bikes is 'stamped' with its current location, and this location can be updated at any time.
• Each of your reservations knows where it's starting and ending.
• When you check out a bike that has a defined starting location, it will update the location of the bikes involved in that rental with the start location
• When you check in a bike that has a defined ending location, it will update the location of those bikes with the end location.
• Optionally you may want to use Reservation Types to tag your reservations with where they are occurring.  Imagine you have a location called canterbury(CAN) - and you also decide to create a reservation type called canterbury.  When you create a reservation of type canterbury - it will automatically add the START and END location of that reservation to canterbury.

Multi-locations is an optional module in BRM - please ask support if you don't have it enabled.

To find out HOW to do this, please refer to the detail here:

• FIRST setup your locations.  Settings > Multi-Locations

• You can specify a list of locations - such as stores that you operate from.   You give them short codes (and a colour), like they do for international airports - LHR for London Heathrow  LAX for Los Angeles etc

• Now set the location where each item is currently situated

• Each of your bikes is 'stamped' with its current location, and this location can be updated at any time.

• you set the location of your bikes here in Inventory Management;

• Finally make a reservation - including location information

• and you will see the current location of your bikes each time you make a reservation:

• Each of your reservations knows where its starting and ending:

• When you check out a bike that has a defined starting location, it will update the location of the BIKES involved in that rental with the start location
• When you check in a bike that has a defined ending location, it will update the location of those BIKES with the end location.
• Optionally you may want to use Reservation Types to tag your reservations with where they are occurring.  Imagine you have a location called canterbury(CAN) - and you also decide to create a reservation type called canterbury.  When you create a reservation of type canterbury - it will automatically add the START and END location of that reservation to canterbury.

You can even see the locations of your bikes when you are making a reservation, in create mode:

One large caveat with running multi-location and taking online bookings:

Now, beware of one caveat - multi-location within one BRM / RSM does not mean that we track your inventory within that location!!

It just takes the customers requested location, and you need to make sure you have enough bikes at each location.

In other words, the system will track your availability globally, not per location.

* but sure BRM has built-in tools to help you achieve this goal

But we do have tools to help you manage this:

1. lead time - set a long lead time so you can ensure enough bikes at designated location(s)
2. location per bike - track a bike's current location (see this article)
3. locations per reservation - you can track start and end locations (see this article)
4. coming soon - BRM will tell you when each rental has items in the right place - or not.

Further tips:

• you may want to have some sort of naming convention for your bikes, for example C54 for a bike normally based at Canterbury, W477 for a bike normally based at Whitwell
• if you do online booking across multiple stores, your clients can specify the start and end locations via the online booking wizard.

See Also

multiple locations overview

show & hide columns in the Reservation List Panel 

show & hide columns in the Reservation Planner Window