DealersEdge Professional Forums

We are getting ready to upgrade our ADP system and they are recommending an ASP system, which puts your main computer in Chicago, and you basically work by T1 phone on the system all day long. Anyone have any experience with ADP's asp system? I understand other mftr's are getting into this too, any comments on any asp's out there would be appreciated. Concerns we have are operating speeds, down times, problem resolutions, etc. We are a total ADP dlrshp, so have accounting payroll service parts on with them.

We recently converted from a ADP inhouse to a Arkona ASP. The speed is remarkably fast. We already had a DSL, which is also used as a backup to the T1 we had to install.
Was the ADP ASP proposal more than a new inhouse? It was to us, as a matter of fact they weren't that interested in switching us to a ASP, stating it was too costly! The biggest benefit for us with ASP is that it has 24/7 support. Therefore, we would no longer be at ADP's mercy of their understaffed field support, or business disruptions.
You should seriously considering talking to the folks at Arkona. We are happy about our conversion and saving lots of money everyday!

Not sure if you are seeking general information about ASP environments. If so you can go to www.eds.com/arg and download a white paper that we developed to assist any dealer when evaluating if ASP is right for them. On the website look for white papers and the one titled The Seven Keys to a Successful ASP Implementation.

EDS is currently deploying the automotive retailing industries largest true ASP environment. By May of 2004 there will be more than 500 stores on the solution with nearly 10,000 users. The stores that are running on it today find the system speed to be very fast (sub-second for most screen refreshes), the up-time of our solution exceeds 99.98% (or less than 7 minutes per month of non-scheduled down time per month), and it is hosted in one of EDS' Data Centers that secures data for clients like GM, DCX, Dow Chemical, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Navy to name a few. Our ASP offering is typically less expense to own and operate over a 5-year period as compared to a traditional in-store server environment.

If you would like to speak to dealer who is running on this type of solution contact Greg Gillman owns 3 Saturn stores at (931) 553-8700.

P.S., during the power outage that effected much of the NE and Mid-West, our Primary Dealer Systems ASP hosting environment was without power - however the data center never came off line (due to battery back-up capabilities and diesel generators) and no client (100,000's of users including all GM dealers using GM Access and GM DealerWorld) noticed one second of down time due to the power interruption.

I recently spent some time at a dealership that was on the ADP ASP system, and in all honesty the performance (i.e. speed) of the system was better than any in-house system I have been on.

The dealership was happy with the advantages the ASP model has to offer, particularly the fact that they have very little maintenance issues to deal with. They had no reports of any significant down time, and have been on the system for three years I believe.

Dealers do not need to be worried about not being able to access their data in the event they switch vendors, etc... Those things are taken care of legally in the contracts.

I was impressed with what I saw and the overall performance of the system.