Online Repair Updates With A Click

As a business that rents cars to people whose vehicles have been involved in accidents, Enterprise Rent-A-Car Co. deals daily with consumers, insurance companies, and auto-repair shops. A new application is moving customers and partners off the phone and onto the Web, cutting the time it takes to get drivers back into their own cars by about half a day.

The largest car-insurance replacement company in the nation, Enterprise manages a fleet of 600,000 loaner vehicles in a nationwide network of 4,500 locations. When a consumer has an accident, an insurance adjuster creates an online reservation in the Automated Rental Management System (ARMS) that goes to Enterprise's Seagate Technology Inc. data warehouse in St. Louis and is forwarded to the Enterprise location closest to the accident.

Insurance companies also can use the system to reserve cars, obtain authorizations, and get management information, such as the average cost of a transaction, the average length of their car rentals, and their total gross costs. The system supports electronic data interchange, though senior VP and CIO Bill Snyder says that most customers haven't expressed a great deal of interest yet in direct settlement.

Web-enabling ARMS, an AS/400 system developed five years ago, also makes it possible for Enterprise to tie in repair shops. Instead of spending time on the phone giving estimates of when the cars will be ready, mechanics can post repair updates and estimated completion times online. Insurance companies can monitor those updates online, and Enterprise can check on when to expect its cars back on the lot.

ARMS saves an average of eight to nine phone calls per rental among Enterprise, repair shops, and insurance companies, says Bill Tingle, Enterprise's E-commerce VP. That translates into a $54 million annual savings for insurance companies. Enterprise has spent about $11 million in hardware and $17 million in development on ARMS since its launch, Snyder says. But he credits the system with build-ing a loyal network of 150 insurance companies and 2,200 repair shops.