Filling up your giant availability grid is like a huge game of Tetris. Blocks come in (rental requests) and you have to place them against your rental items without overlap:
Of course this is further complicated if you have customers who want to move around blocks after they are placed (i.e. change reservation dates)
Optimising your utilization
If you have a very busy shop, and you run your fleet at capacity (or near capacity) you may run into problems if you try use GBAL mode.
(we call this the Tetris or jigsaw problem)
GBAL - Generic Book Allocate Later is doing something very clever, it lets you allocate bikes later, but without going 'over-sold' on any given product line for any given date. However what it doesn't do is optimise your use of assets to make the best use of your available assets given the reservation loading you want.
So you may get BRM telling you there is no room, when you might disagree. To fully optimise your fleet allocation and therefore squeeze in more rentals, you need to manually allocate in an intelligent manner.
Please see this example:
In time we hope to make BRM auto-allocate bikes in an intelligent manner to optimise your fleet usage - but right now manual intervention is required to manage this complex task.
- in some ways it's like when you need to 'de-fragment' your computer hard drive, to fit in more data. It tends to get messy over time and therefore uses your disk space in an in-efficient way. See more info here.