United Rentals, Greenwich, Conn., is now using the Zilliant Margin Maximizer and Margin Insight solutions from Zilliant, Austin, Texas, across the equipment rental company's integrated network of more than 550 branch rental locations in 48 states and 10 Canadian provinces. United Rentals also is piloting Zilliant's Margin Manager with an expected full roll-out in early 2011.

“As the market leader, we sought to employ a tool that could offer us a rigorous pricing methodology to support our customer segmentation strategy and increase the effectiveness of our sales force,” said Michael Kneeland, CEO, United Rentals. “We selected Zilliant because the company has demonstrated success with their price segmentation and statistical scientific software technology that specifically addresses the pricing challenges we face every day.”

United Rentals said it deployed Zilliant Margin Maximizer to improve the quality and accuracy of customer rental rates to maximize return on assets. District and national account managers can use Zilliant Margin Manager to gain detailed visibility into the pricing performance of rental agreements and streamline the customer rental experience. Zilliant Margin Insight provides the organization clear visibility into margin and revenue performance across all branches, enabling the rental company to take necessary action on pricing opportunities quickly. Sales teams in the field also have the ability to access market-based rate guidance directly from mobile devices, ensuring quick and accurate transactions.

Zilliant’s Margin Maximizer and Margin Insight price optimization and management solutions are designed to improve all facets of business-to-business pricing — segmentation, analysis, setting and execution — to increase margins and maximize profits. Margin Maximizer optimizes prices, reduces risk in the marketplace, minimizes over-discounting in the field to drive improvement to operating margins while Margin Insight can show over-discounting patterns, quoting errors, cross-selling opportunities, off-invoice margin erosion and cost-to-serve variances.

“Partnering with United Rentals reinforces Zilliant’s position as the leading provider of price optimization solutions in the equipment rental space,” said Greg Peters, CEO of Zilliant. “We are excited to work with the largest company of this type in the world and are pleased to see United Rentals experiencing significant margin lift and greatly improved financial performance because of our technology.”