Running a profitable rental business means maximising inventory utilisation - renting as many times as possible with as small an inventory as possible.

That means playing rental Tetris and that’s Ally’s bread and butter. Ally constantly sorts your reservations across the items on a SKU (rememeber: Supercycle knows you have 5 individual items, each with their own availability, not just a SKU with 5 in quantity) to maximise availability for future customers.

Also a bit of a geek? Ally is a greedy algorithm that essentially maximises the space between bookings, with a few other considerations. All new bookings placed are run through the algorithm.

This means that future customers see the largest date ranges possible and so have the most flexibility.

We’re not secretive about this stuff - if you want to chat about (and help us evolve) Ally, just reach out!

​
Buffers and cutoffs

When Ally is optimising availability, it takes into account your logistics buffers to ensure bookings aren’t placed too close together. You’ll learn about logistics buffers in Supercycle next.

​
Allocating membership rentals

Regardless of whether you encourage them to, you can’t know a customer will send back a membership item on a certain date. Because of that, Ally treats membership rentals with indefinite end dates, so no future rentals can be placed against that item until it is returned.

Retire and deleteLogistics buffers