How Tanglin rebuilt a New Zealand motorhome rental company from the ground up – replacing paper, fax and a wall-sized scheduling whiteboard with a real-time online booking and fleet management system that lets the business trade with the world 24/7.
The client was a campervan and motorhome rental company operating from a head office with branches across both islands of New Zealand. It hired vehicles to customers around the world – a tourism business where bookings arrive at all hours and across every time zone. This case study has been anonymised.
Tanglin was first asked to review the state of the company's IT and business processes back in 2004. What began as a rescue of a failing network grew into a complete digital transformation of how the company operated – and a partnership that ran for more than two decades.
When Tanglin reviewed the company in 2004, there was effectively no IT to build on. There was no infrastructure, no planning and no network linking the branches. PCs had been bought piecemeal, and one regional operation in particular was a "home-made" network – a mish-mash of machines that was, operationally, at the brink of failure.
Every hire was run on paper. When a vehicle was checked out, the customer details and any pre-existing damage were recorded by hand. The departure branch then faxed that paperwork to the drop-off branch so the vehicle's condition could be compared on return – and the completed paperwork was faxed again to head office. All financial analysis and processing was 100% manual, slow and dysfunctional.
The fleet itself was scheduled on a single massive whiteboard – dates across the top, vehicles down the side. Worse, an enquiry arriving from Europe after close of business on a Friday in New Zealand could sit for days before anyone could confirm or decline the hire. For a business selling to the world, that delay was lost revenue.
Tanglin deliberately delivered the transformation as a graduated plan – modernising the foundations first, then automating the processes on top, keeping business risk low at every step.
Tanglin installed SonicWall firewalls at every location, connecting all four branches into a single secure network. For the first time, every site – and head office – could share live data instead of faxing it back and forth.
A server-based InfoPath document replaced the paper hire form. It calculated all hire pricing – even distinguishing direct hires from aggregator and commissioned third-party sales – handled customer options, and captured vehicle damage markup directly on the document.
Every hire document saved instantly to the server, feeding real-time reports: pickups scheduled for today and tomorrow, drop-offs due, and more. Staff could now prepare each vehicle in time and schedule maintenance and repairs neatly between hires.
Check-in and check-out moved onto HP Tablet PCs – at a time when tablets were barely available – so staff could work alongside the customer at the vehicle. It's functionality that, even in 2026, other rental companies still don't offer.
Tanglin worked with a mathematician to build an exceptionally complex scheduling algorithm. It accepts or declines hire requests in near real-time, allocates vehicles optimally, and automatically reshuffles allocations when a vehicle breaks down or returns late – an edge no rental company worldwide could match.
Tanglin built the entire application behind the company's website. Running worldwide around the clock, it accepts or declines hires, offers alternative vehicles and manages the whole hire process including the finances – leaving staff simply to prepare and maintain the fleet.
The rental industry has a concept called "free sell": while there are plenty of vehicles available, requested hires can simply be accepted – until stock drops low enough that each new hire needs careful thought about its knock-on effects. Doing that by hand, on a whiteboard, across four branches and every time zone, was impossible at speed.
Tanglin's scheduling algorithm solved it definitively. A request that the algorithm declines genuinely cannot be accommodated – there's no guesswork. A request it accepts is allocated a vehicle and slotted into an optimal schedule in near real-time. And when reality intervenes – a breakdown, a late return – it reshuffles vehicle and hire allocations automatically. That capability surpassed anything in use by any vehicle rental company in the world.
Trading with clients around the world, online and in real time
Branches unified onto one secure, live national network
Scheduling algorithm surpassing anything used by rental firms globally
Continuous IT partnership, from rescue project to full transformation
Manual, fax-based hire and finance processes eliminated end to end
Delivered to plan, with revenue and cost savings beyond expectations
Delivering the platform was only part of the story. Throughout the rollout, Tanglin managed the company's day-to-day IT – standardising PCs across the branches, monitoring them remotely and supporting users in every location, while still travelling to the sites in person when it mattered.
Tanglin also addressed the company's disaster recovery and backup needs, putting regular backups and offsite DR recovery capability in place so the business it had transformed was also protected. Behind all of it sat a commitment to support the network and hardware whatever the hour – the kind of reliability a 24/7 international tourism business depends on.
What makes the relationship work is the approach: truly understanding the business, process-mapping how it actually operated, and building a graduated plan that brought the transformational elements together logically while keeping risk low. Twenty years on, that's why the partnership endures.
“What you delivered to us is exceptional and has now enabled us to do business 24/7 with our clients from around the world. The solution you delivered is world class – not only because it delivered on the objectives, but it has also created revenue and cost savings beyond what we expected. On behalf of the Board I want to express our thanks for the achievements over the past five years and your perseverance through the challenges of delivering such a complex solution.”
John Cooper — Managing Director of a New Zealand motorhome rental company
From rescuing a failing network to building a world-class platform, Tanglin understands the business first – then delivers IT that moves it forward. Let's talk about what's possible for yours.
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