Key insight
"Visibility across the whole business."
Titan is very user-friendly, with exceptional visibility. The most valuable thing for a Dealer Principal is the oversight of the business. It’s all there, and you can see it all, so it helps you manage the business better.
Titan is looking at the business in the same way as we are, so we don’t have to keep buying bolt-ons to make it work. Any suggestions we have, they are very open to having our feedback."
Titan is all-encompassing so we aren’t having to find cheaper solutions elsewhere to compensate for missing items.
Immediate improvements
"With Titan, we noticed improvement in our departments within the first three months of implementation."
Increased profit
"Vehicle gross has increased due to it being easier to cost vehicles at point of sale – on average it has increased by $200 per unit."
Time saving
"It is less time consuming to complete a stock order with Titan than what it was with Pentana as there is no manual entry – it is fully automated.
This is a time saving of 260 hours per year at a minimum."
Values alignment
"Titan’s values align with ours. Customer service is everything and so far Titan has delivered."
Immediate results
With Titan, we noticed improvement in our departments within the first three months of implementation. For example:
Service
Service scheduler is vastly improved on what we had available on our previous dealer management system. We are booking our workshop to a higher capacity due to it, which has resulted in a 10% increase in productivity.
Parts
There are fewer double-ups of orders because Titan will only physically allow a part to be ordered once. This reduced aged stock as generally, we cannot return parts once ordered.
It is less time-consuming to complete a stock order with Titan than it was with Pentana as there is no manual entry – it is fully automated. This is a time saving of 260 hours per year at a minimum.
Parts forecasting is great, it guarantees that parts will be available when required based on an RO being created which then means there is less work in progress, meaning money is not left outstanding.
Finance
Our business manager is also our pre-delivery manager so she is now able to see exactly at what point new vehicles are in the service department and whether parts have arrived. It has alleviated the need for daily meetings with the service and parts department – meaning she now has more time to spend selling to customers.
Sales
Vehicle gross has increased due to it being easier to cost vehicles at the point of sale – on average it has increased by $200 per unit.
CRM
One of our key reasons for changing to Titan was the CRM system. Two years earlier Pentana stopped supporting their CRM system which cost $85 per month and wanted us to upgrade to something that cost $3,500 per month plus a $15,000 upfront install cost plus an upgrade to our server. We couldn’t afford to do that, nor did we want to, so I had been exploring external CRM systems.
However, every time I found something, we could not get the data to automatically flow from Pentana to the external system so everything would have had to be entered manually. This wasn’t a great solution, so we stopped all of our CRM activities at that time. It’s been a big learning process and it’s still not 100% correct, but we have now got an operational CRM system with Titan.
Alignment of business values.
Titan’s values align with ours. We want to be sure that our customers get the best experience from us without excuses, and we expect the same from our DMS. If we physically can’t do something with our DMS, then we will give terrible customer service, which we won’t accept.
Customer service is everything and so far Titan has delivered.
Doing it right.
To Titan’s credit, the implementation team stayed back until late at night to get as much data in as possible the night before going live. We just didn’t understand the magnitude of what we had to do and Titan were so patient and made it as smooth as they could.
There were far more people and support on the ground in our dealership, plus the added support of the helpdesk, than we had with Pentana.
Titan didn’t just turn it on and wish us good luck.
Driver for change.
Our main driver for change was the cost of our computer maintenance, as it was significantly higher then the other dealer groups we were benchmarking against.
We analyse all these figures every six months, and they kept asking us what we were doing; why were we spending so much! We asked what everyone else was doing out there and there were other dealerships of similar size to ours that were on Titan. We saw some things that the Dealer Principal had on their email (figures) which we really liked, so we then got in contact with the Titan sales team.
Another reason for change was that we wanted a full audit of our books. Our previous accountant would do everything manually, as he hated Pentana and refused to use it, so we had difficulty finding accurate figures.
The DMS is installed - what then?
The support from Titan has been a huge long process for us to get the books where we need them to be. We’ve never felt like we’ve been forgotten after our installation was complete, like with many other systems. The aftersales services has 100% been there.
Help desk was absolutely sensational. It wasn’t just lodge a ticket and go away, they went through it all with us and were able to help on the spot the majority of the time but also the support we receive is worth way more than what we pay for. It’s one thing to put the system in, but then have it do what they say it was going to do, Titan delivered on its promises.
Any problems we come across with Titan, they’re fixed. The Titan sales team is calling us and asking if there are any issues – we don’t have to chase anyone. The support is there with just a phone call. Lessons learned!
We can understand why the bigger dealerships are hesitant to change and I think we took the change process too lightly. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’d never gone through a DMS dealership change, and I can see how any buy-sell arrangement that changes their dealer management system would see this as too difficult to go through again.
Given what we know now, we still would definitely have made the change to Titan DMS, mainly for that business visibility. No matter the pain we went through (that was self-inflicted) we still would have changed to Titan.
Thanks for the feedback, Belinda