Alert Rental vs. Thrive Technologies

Alert is very suited to the rental industry in general. We struggled a bit at the beginning with multiple locations for the rental business but eventually were able to make that work very well for us, especially helpful when tracking profit for each location. It is less suited to the wholesale business that is also owned here, but there have been ways to make it work for that as well. Overall, Alert is fairly user-friendly and reasonably easy to learn.

No solution is perfect, but I would say that Thrive is a particularly robust and complex solution that's intended to tackle major demand management and inventory forecasting problems. Smaller companies simply won't need a solution that's so all-encompassing. I would recommend waiting unitl you know that you need it before moving forward with a solution like Thrive.

Incentivized

• Posting payments whether by cash, credit card, checks or electronic bank transfers.
• Provides accurate aging reports so it's always clear who is behind in payments.
• Easy to manage steps for billing via email or paper invoices.

• Cloud-based, accurate forecasting system saves lots of time and can tangibly boosts ROI
• Robust demand management down to the SKU level
• Optimized replenishment prevents too much money from being tied up in inventory

Incentivized

• There are some payments that can be deleted and others that cannot; would prefer some features carried across the board.
• An easier method to transfer payments from one account or ticket to another.
• More specific parameters available for some of the reports.

• Although it's simpler than many alternatives, it's a highly complex system and at times we felt lost during the transition period.
• We didn't get the results we had imagined when looking at their case studies and marketing materials. I understand many factors go into those things, and their case studies are not necessarily indicative of typical results, but your mileage may vary.
• Inventory replenishment alerts about potential stockouts weren't always reliable.

Incentivized

I am only experienced in using Alert. Why would we try anything else!

Abas ERP was what we had used previously, and though it did its job adequately, it lacked the forecasting, demand management, and inventory replenishment sophistication of Thrive. We reached a point where we felt it was untenable to supplement the previous system on our own which necessitated the switch to Thrive.

Incentivized

• Alert has helped us to keep track of our substantial inventory and has been beneficial in upselling customers.
• Alert has enabled us to keep track of payments and delinquencies to keep good customers and weed out the bad.
• Alert has enabled us to keep track of the hard workers in the organization to be able to reward good employees.

• We were able to reduce the amount of resources tied up in inventory
• Forecasting tools meant significantly less time spent trying to wrangle spreadsheets
• The transition was painful, causing initial doubts, but it was certainly worth the growing pains

Incentivized