*      All of the users activities are managed from a central location, that allows the user to access applications remotely via the internet.

*      All the features are updated on the remote server, and thus the updates do not need to be handled by the customer.

*      Fast releases of new features, since the entire community of users benefits from new functionality

*      Single database with real-time data

*      Track & record finances as they occur

*      Real time actual cost of vehicles when you need the information

*      Real time posting vs. end-of day batch

*      With data that is always current you are more efficient and make the maximum profit on each vehicle

*      Know real-time vehicle costs

*      Prospect follow-up

*      Perform a multi-company vehicle lookup and transfer

*      Analyze individual salesperson and sales team data

*      Sell Service Contracts independently of car deals

*      Calculate Return On Investments by vehicle

*      Keep costs that are always up to date

*      Scalability to your dealership size with potential to grow as your business grows

*      Built-in data redundancy

Clearly, Software-as-a-Service is key to the ideal DMS model.

We’ve heard some great news about March with some of our dealers reporting the best months they’ve had in a long time.  Will April bring another round of strong sales to the Auto Industry?  Auto Dealer Monthly has a great discussion on this subject.  Click here to read their discussion.

Tell us what you think April and the 2^nd Quarter will have in store for the automotive industry.  Tell us about your 1^st Quarter.  Were your gross profits or unit sales up or down?  Also, let us know a little about your dealership.  Do you sell new cars or used cars?  Do you offer Buy Here Pay Here (BHPH)?

To comment on this post please click the comment button.  Thanks for participating.

• DMS – The DealerTrack Dealer Management System (DMS) was named the Diamond Award winner for the second consecutive year.  The web-based DealerTrack DMS is a flexible and highly cost-effective solution that provides robust functionality and real-time data integration to help dealers streamline their businesses and enhance profitability.

• Desking Tools – DealerTrack’s Salesmaker (TM) won the Diamond Award in the desking software category; it had received the runner-up Platinum Award in each of the last two years.  Salesmaker is a comprehensive showroom solution that helps dealers to manage their customers and quickly structure virtually any type of deal, including retail, lease, balloon and special finance programs

“We are very pleased that our DMS and Desking solutions have been recognized as top performers in their respective categories by the dealers participating in this year’s Auto Dealer Monthly Awards,” said Raj Sundaram, senior vice president, solutions and services group at DealerTrack. “We remain committed to providing our dealer customers with innovative, cost-effective solutions that streamline their workflows and increase their sales and profitability.”

The integrated DealerTrack Performance Suite is the most complete offering of intuitive and high-value software for the automotive retail industry, enhancing efficiency and profitability with DMS, Inventory Management, Sales, F&I and Compliance solutions.

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.

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – March 23, 2010) –  DealerTrack is revving up the analytic capabilities of its Dealer Management System (DMS) with a customer-facing business intelligence (BI) solution from Information Builders, an independent leader in BI solutions. As news about the struggling U.S. auto industry continues to dominate headlines, DealerTrack is demonstrating how BI dashboards, created with the Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform, can help dealers make smarter, more profitable decisions related to customers, sales, inventory, and finance.

In addition to operating the industry’s largest online credit application network, DealerTrack is an application service provider (ASP). It created DMS to manage every aspect of the automotive retail business, from selling cars to handling vehicle inventory to producing financial statements. Offered as an on-demand service, nearly 2,500 auto dealers have adopted DMS for its comprehensive functionality and lightweight, on-demand deployment model. These customers can log in to the system from any Web browser — a similar architecture to the WebFOCUS environment, which is known for its zero-client footprint on user desktops.

According to CJ Pedler, a senior project manager in DealerTrack’s South Jordan, Utah office, DealerTrack evaluated about a dozen BI products and selected WebFOCUS because of its lightweight, browser-based deployment model and also because WebFOCUS provides a superior end-user experience. “Information Builders is pushing us to the top of our industry with its customer-facing BI technology,” he said. “WebFOCUS simplifies deployment for us and improves usability for our customers. Authorized users can use our DMS dashboards to easily select data, format reports, and obtain precisely the types of information they want to see from our Dealer Management System.”

WebFOCUS also works well with DealerTrack’s IBM iSeries platform and DB2 database, which, according to Pedler, made it easy to integrate with DealerTrack’s existing software infrastructure. The new BI environment includes parameterized reports that enable dealers to easily extract data and create custom reports. For example, the Parts Inventory report helps service personnel restock inventory, the Sales History report helps sales managers make smarter purchasing decisions, and the Customer Activity report helps dealers launch targeted promotions. WebFOCUS enforces the existing login procedures and access restrictions resident in the Dealer Management System. A reporting wizard asks questions and then generates reports based on each user’s responses.

“Information Builders has been phenomenal to work with. They have gone out of their way to improve the reporting system, strengthen the security architecture, and make the BI environment very appealing and user-friendly for our customers,” said Blake Nielson, director of solutions at DealerTrack’s South Jordan, Utah office.

DealerTrack demonstrated this new BI environment at the recent National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Show in Orlando. DealerTrack expects to deploy 1,500 instances of the new reporting environment to automotive dealerships this year and ultimately to offer it to 2,500 dealerships supporting about 10,000 users.

“True customer-facing BI environments of this type are rare in the ASP market,” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “Today’s auto dealers must learn to work smarter to increase profits. DealerTrack is using BI technology to help them identify their best customers, pinpoint up-sell opportunities, and run their back offices as efficiently as possible.”

About DealerTrack
Based in Lake Success, New York, DealerTrack’s intuitive and high-value software solutions enhance efficiency and profitability for all major segments of the automotive retail industry, including dealers, lenders, OEMs, agents, and aftermarket providers. For more information, visit www.dealertrack.com.

About Information Builders
Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence (BI) and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.

Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at http://www.informationbuilders.com.

Featured Link:
www.informationbuilders.com

www.dealertrack.com/dms

I recently read an article titled “Put Away the Crystal Ball” by Tony Noland in Ward’s Dealer Business.  I’m sure many of you, like me, are involved in planning, forecasting, and budgeting for 2010.  This time of year really makes me wish for a big crystal ball that will give me the magical answers on how to run my business next year.  Unfortunately, that crystal ball doesn’t exist and, as Tony Noland put it, “We have to plan based on historical information, know factors and sound business judgments.”

Of course we want to be optimistic in our plan but it’s also important to be realistic.  According to Noland, “we want to believe next year will be better and business will be great.  But we have to ask, will it be different and if so, why?”  The bottom line is we have to plan based on realistic historical data.

Many people view budgeting and forecasting as more of an art than a science but with the right data you can make assumptions based on historical and empirical data. With the right software, dealers have a plethora of tools at their disposal that enable them to look back as far as needed to help make logical and calculated decisions for the future So in just a few clicks you can look back at your historical data  and build a solid and logical plan for the future.

DealerTrack DMS offers some great tools for financial analysis.  Click here to read our “Tip of the Week” about DealerTrack Dealer Management System’s financial analysis and how budgets can be tracked and forecasted.

You can read the full Ward’s Dealer Business article by clicking here.  Let me know what you think.  Tell us what you’re doing to plan for next year.  What does your crystal ball say; will we see a substantial increase in the auto industry next year?  Your thoughts and comments are always appreciated.

On October 27th, 2009, NADA released the results of their 2009 Bi-Annual Survey of Dealerships Satisfaction with Dealer System Providers’ Products and Services. Friedman-Swift Associates, a neutral 3rd party, conducted the survey with 984 dealership employees responding. I like to thank everyone who participated in the study as it is a vital benchmark for the DMS industry.

Click here to download more information about the 2009 NADA Survey Results.

DealerTrack DMS, formally known as Arkona, made dramatic improvements from 2007’s survey and outperformed industry in 2009’s survey. Our 2007 survey results were consistent with the industry average but we knew we could perform at a much higher level. Our DMS team set high goals and has worked extremely hard over the last two years to achieve them. I’m very proud of our accomplishments and I can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve in the next two years.

While we are very pleased that DealerTrack has risen well above the industry average, it’s concerning that the industry as a whole has failed to perform at an acceptable level. We plan to lead the industry in customer satisfaction and continue to develop a Dealer Management System that truly satisfies with robust functionality, low prices, and great customer service. Our hope is that the industry follows our lead and reverses their negative trend.

My name is Kevin Carly, Senior Manager of Client Services for DealerTrack DMS. Thank you for joining us on The Dealer Management System Blog. I bring to DealerTrack nearly 20 years of Service Delivery and IT Service Management background from various industry leaders around the world. My primary goal here is to help you get the most out of your DealerTrack DMS experience.

Take the time to read my posts, ask questions, and get involved. I’ll provide you with helpful tips and answers the questions you need answered. Take a look at the “Tip of the Week” or “Q&A” sections or use the “Ask an Expert” button to request a discussion on any topic you wish. Do you have technical or customer service related inquiries? Send them my way. I am pleased to be your gateway to industry and system experts who can provide authoritative responses.

I enthusiastically invite you to engage with us to improve your knowledge and understanding of the DealerTrack DMS system. We’re here to help you take your DMS skills and efficiency to the next level.

If best practices are what you’re looking for, make sure you read my posts.  There will be some informative conversations on how to take your dealership to the next level.  And feel free to use the “Ask an Expert” tool to request a discussion on any topic you wish.

If you’re currently using DealerTrack DMS, then don’t miss reading Kevin Carly’s posts.  He has developed the “Tip of the Week” and will lead our discussions of technical and customer service related topics.  He knows the DealerTrack DMS inside and out, and would be happy to help with any questions you might have.

Occasionally Kevin and I will introduce industry experts.  You might be racking your brain with how to increase revenues in your service department, or how to decrease flooring expenses.  We ’re here to help.

We invite you to get involved in The Dealer Management System Blog.  Post comments, ask questions, make suggestions and share your opinions.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.