Chris Bradley, VP Software & Services
Chris Bradley, VP Software & Services
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When the dealer landscape changes, software providers need to adapt too. That’s why PBS Systems, a leading provider of DMS systems, is offering more functionality to meet the needs of dealer groups.
“We have been a DMS provider for 25-plus years, and we made some major changes that allow us to install dealer groups that we wouldn’t have been able to in our previous platform,” said Chris Bradley, VP of Software & Services.
Bradley said with fewer standalone operations, the company needed to find a way to easily add and remove new stores to a company’s DMS network. “For us, we have to be able to help people get their data in and out of our system a heck of a lot easier, and be able to support those configurations that we haven’t thought of before,” he said. The company describes it as “divisions.”
“Inside of one customer DMS system, we have the idea that we could break it up into a different accounting division, sales division, and fixed operations division. The sales divisions would be like a used car shop and the parts service division could be things like a body shop or a standalone service bay,” he said.
But they received so many requests for combinations that they had to push their software to the next level and add more functionality. “Because generally, it’s not even about just being able to run a dealership like that, but being able to report on it too. Sometimes you want to be able to see just that one operation,” said Bradley.
He said the new system has a business intelligence module that allows users to gather a subset of data, pull it out, and do advanced analytics reporting. “We’ve built a massive library in the last couple of years. So that’s where you can say, okay, well here’s a great report that we’ve seen a lot of service managers use, but what else do you want to do with it? I want to tweak it to only include these pay types or these price quotes. I want to only include this geographic area,” he said.
Ease of moving data in and out, and granting easy access to analytics and metrics through dashboards and reports is one way the company is differentiating itself in the ever changing DMS landscape.
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