FRANCHISES
Hyundai • Nissan
Make the change to Titan – it’s worth it!
I’ve got to run three sites now, and there’s no way I could do it now without the Titan system.
In hindsight, we should have changed to Titan straight away – I should have done it ten years ago.
SHOWROOM
My new and used car gross figures are spot on, where with some of the other dealer management systems, one in particular, when we close off each month (we used to have a manual sales log) there was always a $20-$25K discrepancy. Titan is spot on. By the end of the month you know if you’re going to have a profit.
SERVICE
We had an issue in our service department on our previous dealer management system, regarding productivity and efficiency. Along the way there was an order issue regarding parts. On one of the sites, there was a $5K leakage every month. But the new Titan system doesn’t allow this kind of thing to happen.
The main thing for me was that Titan was an internet-based system and a live system that didn’t require service or back up tapes to be run as it was all live data.
Our previous dealer management system had to run tapes overnight, have a staff member stay back, and if they missed the backup we’d have insufficient data the following day.
Customer support is great compared to some of those others.
You never sit on hold waiting for 10 minutes either, like other dealer management system providers.
The cost factor did play a part in us choosing Titan.
We had only just switched dealer management system providers, so the costs involved in changing to a third DMS provider had to be justifiable – and it was. I should have changed to Titan much sooner.
The monthly fees we commit to Titan, compared to others, are less than half of what other systems charge, and you get a lot more out of the Titan system.
Titan managed everything regarding scoping and converting old data to the new system. It was all done in a brief before we changed over, so there was no issue there at all.
Leading from that, we were able to say how we wanted to run our business, and how we wanted the system to handle the costings, so it was very specific to our business. This was all managed from before we went live.
The product knowledge of the staff that we had knew Titan back-to-front. When Titan staff were onsite from day one, we had one in parts, one in service and two in sales.
There were a lot of Titan staff on site too. We had people from Titan there for another three weeks after go live. They didn’t just convert the data and leave us – there were holding our hands through the whole changeover. You learn best from doing it, and Titan was there to support us through that.
There was Tital sales staff I could talk to from my level, and they showed me how to tailor my reports how I wanted to see it. My training was very specific to what I needed.
The deals are processed when the vehicles are delivered – it invoices the car and auto transfers the profit over to the appropriate department, so there’s no manual deal processing.
With the other dealer management system each vehicle still had to be physically processed manually, so if your staff are off sick for a week you don’t know anything about the vehicle until they return and process it. In Titan, as soon as the car is delivered, it’s in the system. The reports that are sent to me at the end of each day immediately shows what we’ve sold and delivered for the day, and anything that’s been invoiced can be done straight away.
When processed manually, human error means it can be done incorrectly.
You have accurate data daily, regardless of the department, as it’s automatic – it’s live data.
The accuracy of the data out of our previous system was all old – we’d find out two weeks after end of month that we lost money in the sales department. With Titan, it generates the deal profit as soon as the car is sold, so profit and loss is shown daily, so you can see whether you’ll make profit leading up to month-end.
Titan spends a lot of money in developing software updates and improving reporting and simplifying the business in terms of productivity and efficiency. They look for other dealers input for additional development – you’ll notice that the next update that comes out will be improving the system based on the dealer’s feedback – they take that on board quite well.
Based on what they’ve provided in the last 5 years, Titan is a dealer management system that’s moving forward with the changes, and cutting dealership expenses (due to the dealership being able to process its own invoices, etc).
In the next 10 years you won’t need an accountant in the dealership, so in terms of a staff expense point of view, we won’t need qualified staff to operate the Titan system as most of it is self-sufficient – the dealership won’t stop running.
