EasiRent use Tracs for the management of theirvehicle rental business.

The business has branches all over the UK and Tracs manages the bookings, vehicles, customers and invoicing for the whole company. All of the sites are linked to a main centre in Liverpool using VPN andTerminal Server.

The company is a growing entity and was expanding the size of the fleet, the number of locations (and even branching out to Ireland and the USA), the number of customers and the number of bookings.

EasiRent are growing rapidly and their system was creaking under the load of extra bookings and business on the system. To make matters worse, Microsoft had introduced a number of changes to the servers' operating systems that caused the network to become unstable. Under these conditions, Tracs and Topspeed were having problems handling the volume of data that was being generated by the business.

Quite wisely, EasiRent realised that this problem was not going to go away.... more Windows updates were likely to make the situation worse and their growth plans would only add to the burden. A more resilient and scaleable database back end was required.

Something radical had to be done, but what? The company finds that Tracs is an incredible system and handles their business very efficiently. Automated invoicing, inter-departmental fleet sharing are just 2 of the features of Tracs. Tracs runs their business for them and offers a unique cost/performance ratio, when compared to other products on the market.

Switch Tracs over to Microsoft SQL back end server. The front end would remain the same, the users would barely know there had been a change to the system, except that it would be faster.

So, Laser Byte converted all of their existing data over to SQL and changed them over.

The process resulted in less than 2 hours downtime, with all of their old data fully available to them. The whole process was almost completely transparent to the users.

Now, Laser Byte Ltd are able to complete modifications and enhancements without taking them out of the system, the system is faster and since update about 6 years ago, they have not had a single database problem!

Now, EasiRent know that they can grow their business without worrying about limitations in their database. If they need more power the get a bigger server. If that wasn't enough then they can combine servers together into clusters, they can even use VMWare.

Tracs now offers the total growth path and it even has Web enabled components so that third parties can intelligently add bookings to Tracs via their web browsers.

Shortly we will be moving onto Clarion 10 which will offer more capabilities to Tracs.