Diary of a DMS Guy

What we do here is look back

Traditionally, as we come to the end of the year it's a good time to be retrospectively looking at the previous year. However, due to the pandemic, 2020 and 2021 seem to have rolled into one!  So, my next few diaries will look back at the past couple of years.

Traditionally, we have been a DMS supplier.  Our systems have focused on dealer internal processes, as well as CRM systems etc. Basically, anything that a member of staff will need to use to do their job in the dealership. We've allowed dealers to extend this into various areas - telephony, web site etc via links with third party systems, and taking Web Sites as a great example, we can upload stock into pretty much any Motor Trade web site.

However, it was already becoming clear - pre-pandemic - that this was just not good enough!  It meant that dealers had to pick and choose all the parts of their solution and then work with multiple parties (eg the web site provider and ourselves) to get it all to work.  Not a major problem for a single system, but the no of systems that were involved were gradually increasing.  Dealers just wanted more and more an end-to-end turnkey solution managed from a single provider.

Onto our strategy

I'm also very aware that we didn't want to dilute our skills - we know what we do well, and DMS/CRM is it.  We are also great at writing good interfaces to third party systems and solutions.

So, we developed a simple strategy.  Identify the key areas that made up the "end-to-end" processing at a dealership and work with best of breed suppliers in the industry to deliver a one-stop solution.  This meant that we would be able to manage the supply of various systems across the spectrum and allow dealers to make a single decision - ie "Navigator and let us manage the rest.

We already had experience of doing just that - we already had a number of such Partnerships, our Vehicle Health Check Solution is built by Snap-On (AutoVHC) but supplied, installed and managed by ourselves.

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The Timeline

Today, 2 years after starting this process, we have a number of great partners in place or coming online, which cover areas such as Social Media, Web Sites, E-Commerce, Digital Signature, Credit card payments (both online and offline), Vehicle Valuations, Advertising, Provenance - the list goes on!  This has built us great partnerships with companies as diverse as Bumper (for Paylater in aftersales) through to Autotrader (as a Autotrader Connect Partner).

In fact we will soon be in a position to take a startup dealership, and with a single signature supply everything they need - from their social media presence, web site, ecommerce right through to enquiry management, CRM, traditional DMS functionality, Credit card processing etc.

This is a great benefit to our customerbase, both new and existing - as we not only take the "integration" pain away from them, but also work tirelessly to ensure that the integrated solutions are fully cohesive forming a single end-to-end solution.