Open letter to the head of automotive repair shops networks
Dear head of networks,
Your daily challenge is to develop the market share of your brand, the notoriety of your network, the efficiency of your garages and the quality of your support.
Understanding car driver needs, meeting their expectations, improving their satisfaction are key to keep your brand in the race.
Some factors are essential to create the conditions of performance. The right use of data is one of them. As everyone says, data is the new gold for this 21st century. Controlling the data means getting the power.
Where are the relevant data to develop the spare parts business and repair market? More and more they are into the car, sometimes only in the head of mechanics but most of the time stored in the DMS database.
Using this data at the network level, to help garages with their consent, raising their own revenue, requires a DMS standardization over the network.
This is the reason why most of heads of network recommends one or two DMS providers for their network.
As of today, even though networks have international footprint, DMS recommendations for repair shops remain mainly domestic while car manufacturers endorse for a long time international DMS provider for their dealers’ network.
The reasons which drove these decisions for dealers DMS are today valid as well for the repair shops DMS. Firstly, the players are all involved in international projects to apply the same methods and processes, secondly, designing, developing and maintaining interfaces is very expensive, finally, dealing with a lot of DMS companies needs time, energy and people to steer them. Recommending the same DMS for different countries is the best way for head of automotive networks to roll out easier, faster, safer and cheaper new features and projects.
This constitutes a prerequisite to collect formatted and standardized data which are required to improve the network efficiency.
This is the reason why for 3 years we are working to transform the company from a French player to an international DMS provider, with our own teams in every country. The first step was to develop from scratch a new DMS designed from the beginning both to fit this requirement and to provide more value for money. This new DMS takes advantage from the heritage of our huge experience from the French market and the endorsement we already have with French car manufacturers and repair networks. We could prove successful rollouts in Algeria and Morocco combined with a long experience of international business with Incadea, DMS for dealers.
What covid-19 crisis has changed?
From garage point of view, digitalizing as much processes as possible make easier the required social distancing. We observe that those who had a strong customer database to keep in touch with their clients have been able to resume faster and safer their business after the lockdown. Furthermore, using a DMS business oriented with statistics and reports helps to make the right decisions, what is essential even more in a crisis period.
From head of network point of view, getting consolidated data from garages is more than ever key to focus efforts on the right items. Saving cash and time needed for strategic challenges becomes vital. Reducing the number of recommended DMS choosing an international provider allows to liberate a budget to affect on more strategic domain.
Dear head of network, do not hesitate anymore! Recommend for your repair network an international player, driven and supported by IT or business team from one of your countries. Your process and methods are quite the same everywhere in the world, why don’t you use the same DMS, ready to run in each country with the right business, legal and fiscal layer?
We are fully open to start discussion with you to show how you would take advantage from this decision, in terms of range of features, added value for the network, ease for you to rollout global policy with common tools, and of course in terms of costs controlling.
By Gerald FERRARO – CEO Solware Group
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