Kiloutou Boosts Operational Efficiency and Improves Net Prices by at Least 6%

Offering one of the broadest product ranges, Kiloutou is a leading industrial and construction equipment rental company in Europe. When the company’s ERP system failed to manage and optimize prices effectively, Kiloutou adopted Pricemoov’s next-generation pricing platform to transform its business.

Challenged to Align Company and Regional Revenue Priorities

Through its 500+ depots nationwide, Kiloutou offers over 1,500 products for hire, ranging from huge commercial equipment for B2B customers to hand tools for everyday consumers. The company strives to strike a balance between managing prices centrally and allowing each depot to operate autonomously. 

For contract renters – about 70% of Kiloutou’s business – pricing is negotiated and captured in contracts. For spot renters, the company publishes public prices and enables depot managers to apply discounts. 

Despite this straightforward process, Kiloutou faced difficulty in aligning company revenue targets with regional constraints and variations as it analyzed and manually adjusted prices in its ERP system. With so many products available for rent and multiple factors affecting prices, the company couldn’t dynamically change prices at scale and, therefore, missed revenue opportunities.

“Multiply our 1,500 SKUs by the rental period, equipment type, and customer type, and you get 47.5 million prices. Then, you need to adjust for inventory availability and whether our equipment – and those of our competitors – is in high demand in a given region,” explains Laurent Fournier, Director of Pricing Strategy and Business Intelligence, Kiloutou. 

Enabling Flexibility, Agility, and Transparency in Pricing

For all rental scenarios, Kiloutou wants its depots and salespeople to follow pricing guidelines and recommendations designed to ensure optimal prices. It aims to centrally monitor and control pricing, and be alerted to gaps between recommendations and final prices. Moreover, it wants to simulate the potential impacts of price changes based on rental history. 

To support its vision for better pricing, Kiloutou evaluated price optimization solutions and selected Pricemoov for its scalability, agility, and transparency. “We felt Pricemoov could meet our needs best. Plus, we liked that instead of delivering black-box price recommendations, the platform provides transparency into its pricing logic,” says Fournier. 

Automatically Implementing Price Recommendations 

Kiloutou uses Pricemoov to manage both tactical prices, associated with seasonal rates and promotions, as well as dynamic ones based on equipment availability. Kiloutou can easily generate and apply tactical prices as needed, and optimize prices during high usage periods in line with upcoming rental projections. The platform generates about 34 million price recommendations every three hours. 

“With Pricemoov, we are able to implement a robust pricing strategy based on historical data and forecasts. We trust the platform’s intelligent price recommendations and automatically implement them for spot renters,” continues Fournier. 

Improving Net Prices and Operational Efficiency

Today, Kiloutou’s small pricing team – Fournier and a revenue manager – can execute a global pricing strategy for spot prices. In fact, they can efficiently manage prices for all rentals across France, worth more than 650 million Euros in annual revenue. 

With seamless integration, prices are directly loaded from the Pricemoov platform into Kiloutou’s ERP system, ready to be applied by depots nationwide. In addition to easily managing so many price variations, the lean pricing team has been able to increase revenue across the entire customer segment of spot renters. 

Further Collaboration to Optimize Contract Prices

Pleased with the partnership and results to date, Kiloutou is currently onboarding its entire sales team of 300 people onto the platform. Pricemoov’s negotiated pricing solution has recently been implemented to manage and optimize annual contracts. This takes the company a step further toward ensuring consistent pricing across depots while recommending customer-, segment-, and product-specific prices. It also provides KPIs to assist the pricing team to cross-check pricing and ensure contracts are priced optimally.

“Apart from deal prices captured in our ERP and business intelligence tools, we lack visibility into how salespeople are pricing. Pricemoov will ensure we are aware of how – and whether – our pricing policy is being applied,” says Fournier.

The new solution will empower Kiloutou to accommodate customized pricing while democratizing price recommendations and limiting the discounts that salespeople apply to prevent margin leakage. “Pricemoov will enable us to provide the right guidelines and recommendations as our salespeople apply prices,” he continues.

Fournier underscores that what makes Pricemoov stand out in providing this capability is its flexibility. “With Pricemoov, we can decide the level of sophistication for our price recommendations, whether making simple changes to increase revenue or activating a more advanced pricing strategy,” he concludes.