Specific or Generic - which should you use?
The thing about bike rental is that your product, the bike, is a bulky thing! Furthermore they come in all shapes and sizes, so chances are you need quite a lot of them!
All of this means that how you store your bikes may have a bearing on how you want to run things, operationally.
Lets take the two extremes:
- 500 bike shop, 30 product lines, lots of 'identical' bike - e.g. Medium Ladies Hybrid (36 of them)
- 50 bike shop, each bike easily accessible on a hanger
Then you you throw in lots of reservations. Bike orders coming in, 5 bikes on this day 10 bikes on that day etc etc.
If you can get to each bike individually, then you probably want BRM to TELL you specifically which bike to give each customer, for each order. Its just simpler. This is probably the case with the 50 bike-shop. But not necessarily.
(image courtesy of http://www.wirecrafters.com/ )
Then lets take the 500 bike example, all stacked up next to each other.
Each time you want to get bikes for an order you don't want to get a specific bike (e.g. W54) coz it would be really annoying if that bike was at the back of the pile! In this case you want to take the booking (without over-selling) then do just-in-time allocation when customer picks up. This is what generic booking is all about.
Actually its more complicated than simply the size of the operation, you may have lots of bikes, but each one being individually accessible. Or you may only have a small number of bikes, but stack them on top of each other. Its really about bike accessibility which is a function of how many bikes you have AND how much space you have (and well organised you are!)
Okay, so now you know how to decide whether you want to keep Generic bookings or Specific bookings.
Remember you have to consider bookings you take in your admin console (back office) and via your Online Booking.
- online your bookings will always start out as generic - your client doesn't want to bike W54 they just want to book a bike that matches their requirements. But with online you have the choice whether BRM auto-allocates, or keeps it generic until later.