EasiRent use Tracs for the management of their vehicle rental business. The company has grown since its inception. It used a radical marketting strategy, coupled to constant business monitoring to create a very successful business.

With branches all over the UK, but this was not enough for them.... they decided to open branches in Ireland and in the USA. These new countries meant that the system had to cope with new currencies, and new laws that affected the rental of vehicles and subsequent billing. This is how we did it.

Businesses operate in very different manners in different countries. Sometimes this is due to difference in the law, different taxes and other legal constraints. Sometimes it is because the same solutions are not available in the new countries, (such as automatic PDQ payment processing), and sometimes there are cultural differences that mean busines cannot be successful and run in the same way as in the UK.

So, Easirent wanted to operate in Ireland and the USA. Did they want separate systems (the easiest solution), or did they want one big system with all the bookings for all the countries in one big database? They wanted one big system that would be intelligent enough to be able to change itself (what we call morphing!) into whatever country was being processed at that time... and that was dependent on who you were and your log in.

So, it had to show only the bookings for that particular country. On the other hand, it was also a requirement that all of the bookings for the whole world should be available to view and analyse for Head Office staff. But booking is real time... so a booking due to start in Florida at 09:00 is actually happening in the UK at 14:00. So the system had to adjust, live, the start and end times for bookings, depending on who was looking at them.

Each of the hundreds of functions, procedures and reports within the system had to be adjusted so they were country and currency dependent Tracs had to become very clever....... more clever than any other Car Rental System in the world!

Laser Byte sat down and sketched out what was required, a sort of outline specification.

We didn't try to specify everything that would be required. We have found that, with project as large as this, it is impossible to pre-emt all of the requirements. It is just too complicated and big for anyone to predict every requirement. It is better to brak the task into bite sized chunks and deal with each problem as it emerges. If one has access to the right tools, a good conceptual knowledge of the project, and a high IQ, then these things are not that difficult.

Suffice to say, the project was not easy. There were many moments of head scratching. There were times of trying out ideas. There were times of frustration. But there were more times of elation as the project took shape.

There were many problems which we had not envisaged when the statement of "We want to open up branches in the USA and Ireland" was first made by the Managing Director. But this was a team effort. Laser Byte did the design and programming, and Easirent's team guided us through the project.

It is what we call prototyping, and this project shows that it can be used on a huge project. And the result was faster and cheaper to produce than any conventional approach could achieve. It is what we call Just In Time Programming, and it is very successful.