ARMS is a simple concept - a Web-based application that enables insurance companies, Enterprise branches and auto-body shops to manage the entire rental cycle electronically. When someone gets in an accident and files a claim, the insurance adjuster can log on to the ARMS website and create a reservation for the client. Meanwhile, through the ARMS Automotive Web application, the auto-body shop can send daily electronic updates on the status of car repairs. If the repair takes longer than expected, the insurance company is automatically notified through ARMS. Once the body shop completes the repair and the customer returns the rental car, ARMS automatically generates an invoice and sends it to the insurer. Meanwhile, ARMS gives insurers access to a data warehouse where they can slice and dice information about their overall transactions, enabling them to better analyse and manage the rental process on a macro level.

This is a huge improvement over what used to be a cumbersome, paper-laden, manual process. In the past, an adjuster might have had to call an Enterprise branch three or four times before she hooked up with someone who could process a reservation. Now, with ARMS in place, the endless games of phone tag are over. In fact, Enterprise has calculated that an average of 8.5 phone calls are cut from each rental transaction, as well as half a day from a typical rental cycle, saving the insurance industry between $36 million and $107 million annually. That means:

Enterprise personnel are freed up to provide better personal service to the renter (who's typically disoriented and distressed over his accident and loss of car).

Auto-body shops can concentrate on repairs instead of fielding annoying phone calls concerning the repair status.

Insurance companies can cut, on average, a half-day out of the rental cycle.

ARMS was born in the early 1990s, when a couple of major insurance customers, including Geico Direct and Safeco, asked for an automated process that would take a lot of the heavy lifting out of insurance rentals. Without ever doing an ROI, CEO and Chairman Andy Taylor decided that if it was important to Enterprise's customers, then it was important to Enterprise in order to maintain its dominance in the market. So the company went about building the first iteration of ARMS, a system called ARMS Direct, which was a proprietary link between the insurer's claims system and Enterprise's rental system that enabled adjusters to send rental data directly from their own system to Enterprise. However, some insurance companies - particularly the smaller ones - didn't want to do the programming it took to integrate the two systems. So in 1996, Enterprise introduced ARMS 400, an AS/400 host-based application that allowed the adjuster to dial into ARMS and type rental information directly into the rental system, which was more palatable to smaller insurance companies because it didn't touch their own claims system. Finally, in 1999, a team led by Vice President of E-Commerce Bill Tingle and Vice President of Rental Jim Runnels, a business sponsor, introduced ARMS Claims, a Web-based system that allowed the adjuster to manage the entire rental process over the Internet. But that was a challenge. According to Enterprise CIO and Senior Vice President Bill Snyder, the existing systems, with their direct connections between Enterprise and its insurance company customers, had rock-solid 99.9 percent uptime without errors or dropped transactions. Enterprise was therefore concerned about the network control it was losing by transitioning to the Internet, where connection speed isn't as reliable. With a business application, customers expect 24/7 high-speed availability, and they weren't receiving it. "When you get onto a [consumer site like] Amazon.com, there's a level of expectation that traffic might be slow depending on when you go on during the day," says Snyder. "But with our insurance customers, they weren't going to be tolerant of [that]." Tingle's team addressed that challenge by toning down the site's appearance, removing many of the graphics. Customers had liked the snazzy look at first, but the graphics tended to slow transactions anywhere from eight to 10 seconds to a trickle, depending on the time of day and traffic. "After [ARMS] became their daily workhorse, they said, 'You know what? I don't need the pretty horse,'" Tingle says.