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Use case - Rental Hardware

Job to be done

Your company owns a fleet of products that shall be rented out to customers. You operate a web based booking system from which your customers can select the desired product and rental period, confirm booking and perform payment.

This booking system shall interact with virtualfabs fabless operations service using a REST API in order to execute all manual task required to physically ship the rental asset to your customer. Operations such as customer specific product configuration, outbound product documentation, shipment are executed by virtualfab, so you can focus on growing your business.

NOTE: virtualfab provides API-driven access to physical execution of operational tasks

Process flow

Rental hardware process flow

Setting up your virtualfab

The virtualfab API is not intended to set up the required tasks and process definitions. This is done in a prior set up phase, which must be completed before achieving production ready state with your virtualfab.

This process involves setting up your company account, including team structure of people involved in the process. Furthermore, the products that you intend to rent out must be created and all necessary documentation such as instructions, manuals, checklists must be uploaded.

virtualfab supports both serial number tracked unique assets and bulk assets that are just counted.

NOTE: virtualfab asset history functionality requires products of type SERIAL

During the entire set up phase you receive extensive support from our customer success team! Whenever you encounter any problem in the set up phase, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Initial asset provisioning

Once your virtualfab is ready to process shipments. The assets previously registered shall be provisioned to the fulfillment center. Your customer support will provide you with the shipping details. In most cases, this means shipping a bunch of newly manufactured assets to the indicated location. Once the assets are received by the fulfillment center, you will receive a transaction acknowledgement.

Outbound shipment execution

Once the fulfillment center has assets on stock, you may start scheduling outbound shipments of assets.

▶ API-CALL

If required, you may customize the outbound shipment service task.  This could be a photo documentation of the asset at shipment time, your SOPs, or a configuration of your asset according to customer order. You can discover all available tasks using the following.

▶ API-CALL

Inbound asset receival

Once your asset rental periode ends, you have to register the inbound shipment from your endcustomer to the fulfillment center.

▶ API-CALL

Asset history

Each task executed on an asset is logged to virtualfab. You may at any time retrieve the history of a specific asset. This may be required if you need to take a look at the picture of the asset at the time of receipt to check if your customer treated your asset well.

▶ API-CALL