The Old Days

When DMS systems first came to market in the late 70s and through the 1980s, they were all built on non standard platforms.   Dealers at the time didn’t have any other systems and typically, installing a DMS system at that time meant supplying computer terminals (this was before PCs!) on everyone’s desk.

Integration simply wasn’t an issue at that time, if the DMS system needed to do something, then it’s programmers had to make it do it.  They were large monolithic systems isolated from the outside world.

Over the years the first integration items started to arrive. These were brand driven, with the OEMS and importers wanting to provide benefits to themselves and their dealers.  Items such as automated Parts Stock Order export/import to remove there keying of parts line by line into the franchise ordering system online.

Nowadays, a dealer will have multiple systems in the dealership and data is entered, moved around and collected at many levels.

Integration opportunities arise at all levels, with the following benefits :-

·        Efficiency – prevent rekeying of information into multiple systems

·        Distribution of information – make information available where it is needed rather than where it was collected.

·        Performance – remove the administrative task, associated errors and delays

·        Data Centralisation – store data once and move information into the central data storage.

When thinking of opportunities to integrate, it is important to think dealership wide, and not just think computers.   Key integration opportunities exist with a dealer web site, digital marketing platform, telephone system as well as productivity items such as email, sms and even letter printing can be improved by integration.

Fortunately, nowadays, rather than every integration being a complex matter where computer boffins had to design from scratch at great expense, most systems will now support a standard set of Application Programming Interfaces (API) which mean that integration is a far simpler task.

It is even possible for the dealer to use the integration possibilities of their DMS themselves!  

I have many dealers who use our standard APIs (which are all documented) to provide data feeds for their Digital Dashboards and Daily Operating Control reporting in Excel, or who feed sales leads into the DMS  from obscure sources themselves.

For this article, I thought I would highlight a handful of integrations that many dealers won’t necessarily be using to define the benefits or each.     In choosing them I had to sift through literally dozens of integrations that were possible to find a few that would demonstrate the possibilities.

The reason I chose them has largely been the low-cost / high value propositions that they deliver.

Please click below to read the first :-

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