DealersEdge Professional Forums

I am looking for horror/success stories from those shops that went to full electronic retention. It seems from asking around this far the biggest issue is finding the "scanner" person. It is such a low level, go nowhere job that it is tough to find someone dilligent enough to do a complete job.

== Rob ==

We have our appt. coordinators do the scanning here as well as a part-time retiree. This seems to work well for us being that our BDC is open from 7:30a-8:00p M-F! Just make sure that all of your "scanners" are on the same page (no pun intended with the procedure; if someone misses one step, you will have lots of missing pages!

Rob, we use our cashier/office assistant. She does them each day and we generally do not have any problems. She was out for a week on vac, the RO's piled up, but she caught up real quick when she got back. All in all it is a good system. We are on Rey Rey.

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Tom Edwards

This is new to me ... Are they scanning in everything -- t/s trees, notes, write-up, etc...?

What software program do you use to archive/manage/search through everything?

Went there with Reynolds about three years ago. the whole scanner/signature capture thing.The scanner we had seemed to be the scanner/shreader type. It crashed constantly for six months and caused us to have a huge mess.

We gave up and went to filing everything by RO date. It makes it easy to purge, you do a whole box at a time.

Our experience is that we usually only need to find one RO for anything in question, not every RO. If it didn't get scanned or if it was misfiled in our old VIN system its gone forever. Misfiled by date is usually found in the next days folder.

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RUSTY B

There are differing degrees of paperlessness.

ERO/ESI - paperless workflow in shop but still print and retain documents in file cabinets in a traditional method

With doc archiving - system electronically stores a copy of the documents without signatures. Some dealers still file the workorders traditionally, other dealers just dump (unorganized) the signed workorder in a storage box labeled with month and year. They claim they rarely (or never) need to produce a signed copy.

With signature pad. Customer signs a signature pad (looks like a clipboard) which prints on the paper copies and the electronically archived documents. Some stores print the dealer copies and file them, others don't print them at all.

With Scanner. As Rob mentions, someone needs to do the scanning. Some do it as a batch, others do it a point of purchase. A good scanner can scan an invoice in 1 second or batch-scan 60 in a minute without needing to type folder/index data. Some systems use a barcoder for indexing.

*** the good and the bad ***
First the good news - It can drastically cut your costs of forms, real-estate, and people expense in handling and filing time.
Many dealers would never-ever consider going back to traditional paper archives.

Now for the not-so-good news.
This is a process/procedure change that affects the whole store with potential legal compliance ramifications. Someone with authority needs to oversee the implementation and on-going usage/maintenance. This isn't a huge time commitment, its just something that needs attention when you have turnover.

In all cases, the success/failure is wholly dependent on your desire and tenacity to make it work. There are several dealerships that have paperless functionality but choose to remain traditional in their printing and filing.
A sharp office manager will be very interested in the installation and training, and will look for more ways in the store to become more paperless. (checks, receipts, A/R, FI deals, end-of-month reports, etc).

However, when the decisions for implementation and training are completely left to your 18-year-old niece of the dealer's brother who is heading to college next fall.......

Be certain you do no get locked into a proprietary system that prevents you from changing DMS Vendors. Had a 20 group friend learn this the hard way. Got rid of brand XXX but had to keep one terminal and the document server running and supported to access any ROs, Counter Tickets, Etc. There was no way to download or convert to a non proprietary format.

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[This message has been edited by deboss (edited 08-30-2007).]