EDS with car lines other than Saturn

[PucHed]

Just curious, but how many people outside of Saturn use EDS as a DMS? I know that it is available, but I have never seen it.

[Richard]

Chevrolet-Buick here; at least for the time being, our owner is shopping right now.

I know of at least 6 dealers in this area on EDS, almost all Chevy/ect or Chevy Stand-alone.

EDS is a good system, but like all systems has it's limitations and bugs. One of the limitations we have learned about was if you don't retrain, you miss out on some of the things your current system can do.

Another limitation (in some peoples opinion) is that not many aftermarket applications will use EDS; ie, Service follow-up, ect, just don't offer any services to EDS users.

On the brighter side; expect nearly 100% uptime with EDS. We have been on EDS for over 10 yrs now, and have had ZERO downtime due to our AS400e, or periphals.

[PucHed]

Wow, I am down daily. That is amazing for you.

I am not really that pleased with some of the reports, and the Parts system leaves a little to be desired, but I understand the New and Used Car systems are great.

I was just curious, I have worked maybe 80-100 parts inventories outside of my store, and I have never seen EDS anywhere else.

It also struck me as odd that we have a special forum on this site just for EDS. No UCS or R&R.

[Richard]

The reason we have forum, and they don't? EDS's wonderful customer support!! I suggested it, they agreed to it.

Wonder why R+R and ADP won't step up to the plate?

[Matt Parsons]

First I would like to thank several of our clients for their words of support.

The reason we started this forum is that we knew some clients and others like to share information via mediums such as this - so we approached the Dealersedge and asked if we could have a track/forum for EDS...and here we are.

In regards to our systems - within the automotive retail space our division is supporting in excess of 14,000 dealership customers across the entire Western Hemisphere (Canada to the tip of South America). The two main solutions we offer into the market are our DMS solution (installed at just slightly over 1,000 dealerships in the US representing every manufacturer - GM, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, etc., with roughly 500 of these being Saturn) and electronic parts catalogue solutions (about 13,000 installations). EPC's include PartsImager and Microcat and cover GM, Saturn, Ford, Toyota, Lexus, Land Rover, Hyundai, and Daihatsu.

EDS also offers the industries only true ASP delivered DMS hosted at one of our data centers and delivered to dealers via VPN or DSL. If interested I can explain what we mean by true ASP.

Hope this helps.

[Matt Parsons]

One more comment. Recently EDS has introduced two products that make it very simple to integrate with any third-party providers services (such as service follow-up companies, warranty companies, JD Powers PIN, etc.). The solution consists of Executive Assistant (a data mining and data reporting tool that is a standard component of our systems) and Automate (a job scheduler and file transmission tool). With the recent addition of Automate to our dealers (a one time cost of $295 and $5 shipping - no recurrings), our clients can virtually pull any data from their system and FTP it to any third-party company they wish to do business with in any format. The files are transmitted with no in-store intervention (following initial set-up) and data can be transmitted on whatever frequency you wish (hourly to your website for inventory information, monthly to your CPA or daily to a service follow-up provider). This is very important in that dealers are operating under very stringent restrictions in regards to data protection - thus you do not want people dilaing into your system to access data. You want to control who sees what and who gets what.

Sandi Jerome of Sandi Jerome Computer Consulting has repreatedly said that EA is the best data reporting tool in the industry and combined with Automate, there is really nothing stopping you from using your data inconjunction with any other service offering - seamlessly.

EDS has put many of the EA reports that come standard out on our website (www.eds.com/arg) in the area called Dealer Download Center (EA Library) so people can see the types of data you can pull and if you are a client you can even download reports from this site in an executable format for use with your system (isn't the key to using your system really about sharing information between the provider and the clients and from client to client?). We periodically add new reports to this sight built by EDS and/or built by our clients for sharing.

One last note, I believe that only EDS and UCS offer the capability to not only extract data from your system, but have a mechanism (we call ours GL Upload) to upload data into your system from outside sources. GL Upload allows you to basically take off book entries/transactions and post them into the EDS system from tools like Microsoft Excel. We have many clients who run outside businesses on other systems (rental car companies, leasing companies, etc.) and use EDS as their accounting system, and yet never are forced to post a transaction in the system manually, everything is brought over electronically and they just review the transactions in the batch prior to being applied.

[petepuma01]

Matt

Per your offer, please explain what you mean by 'true ASP'.

Thanks

[aksales]

Well Alaska Sales and Service here, with Chevrolet, Pontiac, GMC, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Buick. On the Same box we also have our Valley store with GMC, Pontiac, and Buick. We also run an accessories shop and do the books for our two rental agencies Alamo and National.

-Jason


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Jason Wilhelm
IT Support Specialist
Alaska Sales and Service www.aksales.com

[This message has been edited by aksales (edited 09-04-2003).]

[This message has been edited by aksales (edited 09-04-2003).]

[PucHed]

Matt, first off, I wasn't trying to slam EDS. I have quite a few issues with EDS on the parts side, but I have recently heard that a lot of those issues were with Saturn, not EDS. We use UCS with all of our stores, so I only have experience with EDS through our Saturn stores. I recently had inventory, and some of the reports were a little cumbersome, to say the least. I was hoping to find out wether this was a Saturn issue, or all EDS stores had the same problems. I hope to be relocating soon, and I think that I may run into others on EDS, and if it was better outside of Saturn, I didn't want to form an opinion. The issue could also be me, maybe there are easier reports or a better way to go about it.

For instance, when we run a variance report, what we get is essentially a counter pad, not just variances, all parts in the system. We then have to go through that report and highlight the variances. The report also is in Part Number order as opposed to Bin Location, so we had to look up Bins to check variances.

[Matt Parsons]

First let me explain what I mean by true ASP. Many DMS suppliers in the industry are now offering 'ASP' solutions. A true ASP solution provides the common infrastructure for a large number of users to leverage this infrastructure (Servers, disaster recovery, back-up procedures, etc.) so as to provide a robust computing environment at reduced costs. What I see most of the providers doing is forcing the client to buy their own dedicated server than housing it in a centrally managed data center. Although there may be advantages to this approach for some clients (you do not have to physically manage the box any longer), all that has really been done is that the cost of managing that single server has been shifted from the dealer to the supplier and in most cases I think you will find this solution to be considerably more expensive. As EDS developed our ASP solution, if we had designed an approach (for Saturn as an example) that migrated all 500 stores and their servers to our data center, the approach would have been cost prohibitive. It is not less exepensive for us to manage the box versus you - unless we can experience economies of scale. By deploying the entire Saturn network (as an example) on a single server (with completely redundant fail-overs for the server, the power, the communications, etc), we are able to spread the cost across a large number of clients and thus make it attractive for all.