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Sally Butler - Dealer Principal
KT Green is a family run business situated north of Leeds and operates Daihatsu, Isuzu, SsangYong and Subaru franchises. Pinewood spoke to Sally Butler about the change from their old dealer management system to Pinnacle:
Our previous DMS was an archaic solution which we had been using for over 20 years. It was all text based and required onsite servers and terminals for storage and processing. The solution was not very user friendly and even if you were highly computer literate users found it difficult to resolve even simple problems.
Our daily dilemma was the inability of the system to manage vehicle stock, as there was no integration of the vehicle stock system to the parts, workshop or accounts systems. This made the general running of the dealership laborious and with no facility for archiving all our service invoices, they had to be photocopied and filed for future reference. This manual process created a lot of additional work and required a great deal of storage space within the business. Additionally when we needed a copy invoice it took time to find and if the customer wanted a copy it had to be photocopied yet again and then faxed.
Integrated information – cross dealership
Since the successful migration from our old DMS to Pinnacle the day-to-day running of the dealership has greatly changed. I finally have the ability to monitor both bonus income and expenses for vehicles as the sales administration is now fully computerised. It is heaven to be able to easily source old sales and service invoices without having to search through filed paper copies and our customer database is more accurate with integrated Experian links and postcode lookups for marketing record creation.
As part of the solution Pinewood provide, we now access a managed internet solution so I can monitor unauthorised internet usage and I do not have to worry about network integrity as virus protection came as part of the package.
We originally chose Pinnacle over other DMS systems because the training courses only lasted a day and we thought the system must be easy to use: which it is!