One of DealerTrack new Dealer Management System Customer recently gave DealerTrack 3 thumbs up and stated
I give DealerTrack DMS 3 Thumbs Up!
Their employees attitude, willingness to assist, responsiveness on the phone and overall demeanor show that they are a progressive and good group to depend upon.
Below is the full story from www.DealerRefresh.com.
Thinking of changing DMS providers? If so I want to share with the community our experiences in the first 30 days after going live with Dealer Track DMS (formerly Arkona).
First I will start off by saying it is nice for a change to have a DMS vendor who treats you like a customer and appreciates the opportunity to earn your business.
We have gone from driving an antiquated Cadillac with all the features money could buy in 1991 to an 08 Ford XLT with Carpet delete. I mean to say DealerTrack’s system does not offer butt warmers so to speak.
Sales & Finance Managers: They refer to their desking and sales software as Business Office. It sounds like this may be common for dealers somewhat east of the Mississippi River. The desking screens work and are fairly intuitive. Sometimes it seems you have to back out of a deal and go back in to get things to re-calc. Your limited to 1 pick-up payment (differed down). Contract letter spacing can only be moved in whole points and is sometimes hard to line up perfectly. DMV fees are hand calculated now and require valid information from your Accounting Dept.
In a nutshell we work deals out of DealerTrack’s Dealer Management System (Arkona DMS) and the rest is done with custom programming / CRM, i.e. Invoice Books, Inventory Analysis, vAuto for booking and used management.
If you are like me go with the green screen software over the GUI they are promoting.
Service Manager: The fixed operations teams had some adjustments to make. You can not close out pay types individually, You can close Customer pay but when you close Warranty it closes Internal as well. You are given a new pay type and that is Service Contracts, kinda nice. There is no way to force a Hat Tag# as a required field instead it can be accidentally bypassed. Tech Time and Tech Clocking / Dispatching if you use dispatching is pretty underdeveloped.
Parts Managers: This department will have a difficult time. Finding the invoices can be a total headache. Furthermore when you order parts and they arrive and you bill them out you get a new invoice#. Transactions can get lost and there are about three screens you need to look in to find them. Creating returns is fabulous and works better than any system I have been on before (Not that I like returns). Once again Green Screen software in this department is a must. Other areas to be aware of is the inability to place 0 quantity of a part on an RO (Usually helpful with parts availability and requisition requests.) Lost Sales once registered on an Invoice can not be converted to sales, they have to be deleted and re added.
Business Office / Accounting Department: Hmm. I will report on the business office in the future cause after 30 days they are still spinning. Fortunately we have a very talented and bright staff and they have made tremendous headway, however Payroll seems to be difficult to fine-tune. Factory Financial Statements and reporting all works well and have not had any issues related to getting the factory their data.
Data Exchange: Works well and even an idiot like me can set up automated FTP uploads. Love It.
OpenTrack: We are a signed OpenTrack vendor for our own internal software. The price was right and the team behind the OpenTrack initiative are awesome. For those that are interested OpenTrack is a SOAP based integration service for data exchange. ODBC is being phased out and to my knowledge is no longer available.
I give DealerTrack DMS 3 Thumbs Up!
Their product has room to grow. Especially for multi-line stores. I would not recommend a multi-accounting / multi-GL setup if you can avoid it. However their employees attitude, willingness to assist, responsiveness on the phone and overall demeanor show that they are a progressive and good group to depend upon.
Jarrett
Thanks Jarret and DealerRefresh for posting this. We appreciate your insight and feedback as we continually improve the DealerTrack Dealer Management System.
