Mets Kramer introduces his new dealer management system.

And the provider couldn't come up with any answers at the house to how and when they could fix these core problems. A lot of the financial functionality was also problematic for them. And so they approached me because they'd seen what little piece we'd done on the CRM and advertising and website integration. We'd help them build a website. And they said, look, can you replace our rental system? And I said, yeah, I think I can do that. And so we scoped it out. And over a period of about six months, I talked to a couple of other dealers, had someone else join in on the project. And we started basically to build a new rental and dealer system. And I've come to see that there's a big difference actually in the industry between those two systems. There's rental systems and then there's dealership systems. And there aren't too many big dealer systems with rental that the dealers are happy with. So because there is such a difference.

But one of the things we did. One of the reasons we did it was that our platform was completely modern. Like what we had built, the websites we built, we were building in React, which is probably one of the lead programming languages at the moment. It's, you know, current generation. It's what Facebook developed to build Facebook and Instagram and all of that. And we were cloud-based and properly cloud-based. And so... That allowed us to apply a lot of modern methodologies to building the software. And what we found was that it was both a lot faster than we'd imagined, as we created core components and then were able to reuse them, and were able to create interfaces that were a lot more intuitive. So that's kind of how we started. And we are now at the point where we have the majority. of all the core pieces all done. One of the key things that we decided to do was to not build our own accounting software.

So our philosophy was accounting is one of those things that there are lots of really good options in the market. And more importantly, there are options in the market for accounting that the developers of that accounting software are still investing in. They have developed a modern code base, and they continue to invest every year in expanding the functionality and most importantly, expanding the integration. You know, like, you know, for yourself, I don't know what you run, but if you run something like QuickBooks online, there's 100 integrations. If you want to connect to your bank, it takes a minute and a half. And now all of your stuff, if you have payment providers, integrating that is a couple of clicks.

And so we decided, you know, we should leverage the fact that that exists out there and although you know many of those small or online accounting systems aren't robust enough to run a dealership the accounting side of it is robust you know so we we built it so that we take care of all of the industry specific the operations specific software and then we simply create all of the various accounting records at various levels in the accounting software. And we figured out that that actually gets us over a lot of the limitations of the accounting package, you know, where you may have multiple branches and the accounting software just simply can't handle that. If we take care of all of that, then it's suddenly not a problem. We can give enough information to accounting. So that's kind of our philosophy. We've integrated several accounting packages already.

And I'm really excited to expand the number of dealers we're working with to provide them both an easy migration from their existing system or from many dealers, you know, who have really just been trying to run it off the shelf stuff. We can do a really easy implementation. We just take what they're already running for accounting and we patch in all the functionality they need.

Yeah.

We have two packages. We're fully modular. So that was, you know, one of the other goals I had was, you know, I when I entered the industry after the big dealers and started working with smaller dealers, I came to realize that not everyone needs everything. And one of the problems that they were facing is that it was like an all or nothing. offer from most. And if they did go look at other options in the market, they were told, yeah, it's modular, but you kind of have to have all these modules if you want this module to work. And so we've built it truly modular. Like we have some dealers who run just the rental, just the work order, just inspections, just, and we made it so that we can truly turn other pieces off. And that makes it easier to implement. I think what happens is, or what has happened, is that a lot of the rental packages out there were built around a particular rental process, you know, and have evolved from that.

They built a core logic that, you know, is so deeply buried in old software code, you know, and all your old friends that wrote it have retired, you know, and no one knows how to read it anymore. um and and so it's that's why it's prescriptive and and then they've kind of expanded around the outside of that to do what a rental house would need and then you know this is the problem my dealer had was they wanted to sell a machine like why do you sell a machine well you kind of take this rental contract and you kind of put a machine on it but you sell it like so it still looks like a rental contract yeah yeah but it'll get it sold you know and and so What we've done is we've created these really four major areas of the dealership business, rental, sales, parts, and service. And each one of them is like their own pipe.

And then at the end of each of the pipes, at the end of the process, when they need to invoice, that's when we put them into a common module, which is our finance and integration module. And so that means we can really build a rental system. inside the rental module and keep it separate from our sales and our work order system and stuff so that we don't have to, you know, try and make the rental module or the functionality of the rental module do something else. And this is one of the things I learned. I used a system called Ban for years at one of the dealers. And, you know, we had to put labor in the warehouse. And I always thought it was madness. Like we have to put a million dollars of labor in the warehouse or a million hours of labor. And that way for the next couple of years to come, you know, when you put labor on a sales order from a work order, then it knows where to get it. You know, then it can sell the hour of labor.

And it's like, well, you know, and the one good thing was, and I think most people who look me up will know that I started at a cat dealership and I got involved in this software game. there. And because I got involved in the software there and I got involved in just information and looking it up in the CAT system, you kind of see a system that had some ideas in there that recognized that labor was a separate thing from parts. You don't put labor in the part system just so that you can get it onto a sales order. You deal with it properly. And so we've tried to follow that same philosophy. major item in the system has its own needs and requirements. We don't fit it into something that's close enough, like the part system, just so that we can transact it.

Yeah. Well, I think so. I love how much history you know. And so this won't be, I think you'll agree with this. I think what's happened, unfortunately, is, you know, some people wrote this original stuff. And they did a good job in a lot of places in getting core logic. But somewhere along the way, you know, we forgot to teach people, A, how it worked, or put... the value into getting the people involved in the software to really understand the business well enough to actually write it themselves. Right. So if we make that transition from someone who understands the business that can design the software and to handle the transactions as we're doing them, and then we hand that over to someone who doesn't know the business, but only knows software, then what the code does is a little bit of magic. you know, unless you really understand what's happening.

And so what we've tried to do is take everything we know about how the business runs, how it should run, what all of these little objects are that we are actually transacting and handling and managing every day and remember or understand what all the good systems did in those cases. And then rewrite the logic in modern software instead of taking that core piece of an old software and say, okay, well, that works. I don't really understand how it works, but I know what goes in and out. And so I'm just going to reuse it over and over, but I can't change it because I don't know how to change it. And so that's been really one of the joyous things, exciting things is to just really readdress all those items. in a modern way and you bring up parts sales, one of our missions is to support that. And so our platform has a full API. Anything that you do in our web interface can be done by an outside system.

As long as it has security keys, then it can come in and do that transaction. So we're working with a dealer who has building a brand new website and they are putting parts. processing in it. So we feed them all the parts data and they can just come into the system and create parts orders, parts invoices, however they choose to do it. They just emulate what we can do through our API. So that will enable the thing that's been so hard for people to do.

Application programming interface.

Yeah.

Yeah. Or

Yeah. No, no. We're just going to cut off. We're just going to cut off your customer's name. Yeah,

You know, because we only programmed it with 50 characters. I'm sorry.

Well, we're creating it in combination with a group of dealers that have, you know, that have been working in the industry for decades, that have the desire to resolve some of the problems they have. But I've seen, you know, what else they've tried, what else is out there. And so they've been really strong partners. This is not a situation where I decided, hey, it'd be fun to spend two years building a new ERP system. It's been a partnership with people who are doing it day to day. One of the dealers we're working with had actually built. some of their own stuff in house, you know, and as the generational change there is happening, the person who wrote it all nearly needs to focus on running the dealership instead of software. And so we're, you know, taking advantage of everything they've learned in that process as well. So.

Yeah, pieces of it are live. And at this month, we are taking several dealers live in the sense of financial integration, end-to-end integration. Pieces of it, aspects of it have been live for the last 12 to 18 months. And because it's modular, one of the first modules that we built was an inspection module. And that's, you know, a fairly standalone function and it's been running for quite a while.

Yeah, we have two components to it. One is the mobile app for phones and tablets. And the other piece would then be the web application. that runs on the computers. And so one of the things that one of the big changes we're trying to implement here too is that we're not a transactional system with stuff attached to it. You know, we really tried to look at this idea that really in everything we do, we're trying to replicate the real world. And so all the objects that we're dealing with are, you know, analogies or avatars or whatever you want to call them in software terms for real world things. Just like you and I go on the internet now and we are represented by our avatar, our LinkedIn page or this page. It's trying to replicate real life things. And a lot of other systems, unfortunately, are built around transactions. They're transactional systems. And then once those transactional systems got fairly mature, people were asking for other things.

I mean, I grew up at Tormont. reason I know how to where I learned how to do all of this was that we had DBS and DBS was a transactional system and everything that we need to do that was more process oriented you know business management type functions Tormont built a ton of them I built EMT which was the equipment management management toolkit which was contract management and maintenance planning and stuff And so we try and represent a lot. And so inspection then just kind of falls in. And in our modern world, image management, media management is like core. It's no longer a nice to have on the side, you know, having pictures of things, whether they come from inspections or I've got a service tech who's working on a machine doing a service report and he wants to send some pictures of what he finished.

Or, you know, if in the part system, I want to order some parts and I don't know exactly what it is and I want to send it to my parts guy and take a couple pictures, you know, like that. These are all core things. And so we've been able to kind of reorient the platform around objects and real world living in the software sphere.

and we

Right.

No, I mean, it's hard. And in our industry, it's been classic. You know, you have two kinds of dealers. One is where the accountants pick the dealer system and they're happy with the accounting software. And the other one is where the operations people picked it and they're happy, but neither is ever fully happy.

It's a different, like we've been trained by generation or a couple of generations of using software. I mean, there's no training manual for Facebook. You go on and you just click around. And we've learned a lot over the last 20 years on intuitive interface design. And people have spent so much time in interfaces that they intuitively know that they can move around and click and drill down on things just in an intuitive way. And yet the old transactional systems. You have to be taught how the transaction flows and what number to put in what box to get it to go do the next thing. And that's, you know, switching to building in a dealer management system in React and being able to use all of the modern tricks or integrations or, you know, types of controls has been huge. We get people on the system and they just start kind of clicking around like, oh, I get it. Like, yeah, when you want to.

do this kind of action, we can just put it where that action is natural. If you want to see something more about something, then we can bring in nicely integrated pop ups or bring you to other places or open other windows or whatever it needs to be. And that's been a big change as far as training people what to do.

Yeah, we just, you know, one of the nice things is we can create little components. It's basically a one page application is called each module. And so once we create a little component. we can make that component show up anywhere. We don't have to rewrite the code. We just say, oh, turn this area of the screen into a link to that component. If I'm looking at a machine and I want to see my live GPS data coming in on a map and stuff like that, I just hover over it or I click on it and the little component comes up and shows me that. And so that allows people to work in an intuitive way and get more out of it because they're not going. They're doing less just trying to get through their transaction.

call them widgets.

Honestly, we're quite flexible about it. I mean, I think the... The selling of software was how it started. It's definitely swung fully towards subscription. And we found some people who just, you know, what's the best fit for you? And we can do that. We have, the way we've done it, we have a little bit of the benefit of a multi-tenant cloud environment, like a lot of software platforms at the same time for a large dealer that... has specific needs for private cloud or whatever we can deploy into private clouds. We allow for data integration either direct through the database or we have our full API that can be used. And so one of the things that we can do and have done for several dealers now is like solve some really difficult to integrate data problems. You know, we've seen our database go into a couple of places where they were having trouble with their existing system trying to integrate data into it.

And so we just put in our back end to allow all that data to easily pull from this system and that system and this integration and this API and then merge it all in one place. Very easily. I don't have to turn my data into AS400 flat files.

Our cloud? Yeah. So we're currently on Microsoft's on Azure. Okay. But we're not cloud specific.

Yeah. If a dealer says we have a private cloud in AWS, then we can deploy it there.

We're not doing manuals. We have an embedded support platform.

Yeah, well, ours doesn't look, I wanted to do like the paperclip, the old Microsoft paperclip thing again. But we have the same kind of idea, little widget that lives in the bottom corner that if you click on that, it'll give you information on that module, that screen, how to do it with a video of a walkthrough. And then if that's not good enough, you can contact our support desk right from there.

I can't talk about our chat GBT integration yet. Okay. You know, it's a funny thing. I like that you bring up your black and orange screen. Like one of the things that's gotten our users the most excited on days is that it can go to dark mode. Like what's this switch here? Oh, it switches to dark mode. I love dark mode.

It's all little things.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think we'll be, you know, one of the things we've done is a, we partnered with people who were very interested in getting a new solution, a modern solution. Then we've brought on dealers who know who we are and what we're doing, want to contribute, but are, you know, not quite the pioneers. but they will give us feedback and they are tolerant of things that are still being enhanced. And then come April, we expect that we can take on dealers that just really want a solution without too much pain and suffering. So I try and be really open. I mean, it's a monstrous undertaking. It's a really exciting undertaking from the ground up. rebuild all of this logic to be able to reevaluate some logic completely. For example, we figured out a couple of months ago, multi-pathing how service parts orders work. Some dealerships, some systems, when you want to order parts, this is the process you use to order parts.

This is how the system fulfills those parts orders. And that doesn't really fit some dealers and especially small dealers. There's a there's like a real overhead to managing parts kind of in a big dealer way. And so we figured out how to multipath that. So on some orders, they can just quickly get the order done and not have to worry about the whole fulfillment and, you know, inventory transactions and stuff because it doesn't need to happen that way all the time. So that's it helps people be more efficient. you know, problems.

For sure.

I think that's the perfect way to do it. I mean, that's how. So people are taught to think nowadays, right? Like you, you are taught in everything you do. Like if you see something and you want an answer, then you just go find it. You know, you don't say, oh, this is something I'd like to know more about. And my only method of doing it is to go to the HR department and go sign up for a training course and get my boss to do it. You know, I just like, I go and Google it. I find the answers. And if we can integrate that and say, look, Hey. through this process, we can track your progress through these courses that relate to all the modules that you're involved in. And you can do it piece by piece as you're there.

I'm always surprised how much my father remembers from his engineering degree. But then we talk about, like, you know, how far did you get? And, like, the things I studied in my engineering degree. didn't actually exist when he was studying and the next generation is no different and like that's been the exciting part here is you know we're rethinking and delivering something to a generation that thinks and is capable of completely different things you know instead of saying well here's a 40 year old system you know and some of them literally are 40 years old And you're going to run the business with this 40 year old system. And like, I think completely different than this system and no wonder, you know, and so we've been able to, when I did the first software development at Tormont, you know, we did some designs and the developer went away and he was gone for four months.

Then he came back and he showed me the first pieces, you know, now in this new language, we develop stuff over a weekend. When I want a new mobile app, it's done in two weeks and we can do all these things. I mean, that changes how people think about what to do next. When you can say, oh, if you like that or if you want to be able to do that, one second, we'll be back on Tuesday. And now it'll do that. That gets people really applying everything they think and learn to moving forward.

Yep. Yeah. To support that. We've. We have a hybrid database design. We have SQL at its core or as its main structure, and then we have no SQL built in throughout it. That means inside our data structure, we have limitless fields with non-structured data stored in JSON so that when someone says, hey, on this object, can I save this information? We can say, oh, that's no problem. For every object, there is a custom data schema designer that you can go to and you can say, oh, I want to add some extra fields. I want to save some more fields. Okay, no problem. You just define them, what type of fields, and then you can save them. They're done. Two minutes, three minutes, and they can save that information. And that gets people going, okay, now I know where to put that and where to put this. It's not like you said, a help desk repressed and then a review and a design meeting and stuff like that. It's not the modern software world.

I'm excited. I'm scared.

Yeah, that's more than you want.

Yeah. Wasn't there an article that one of our group... road on the lock-in fear of implementations.

There's a lot to it, that's for sure.

Yeah, and on April Fool's, when we launch it, we're going to put a fake UI in that looks like AS400.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, we have a group of dealers, we have new dealers every week that are starting on it. And I've come to realize that, you know, one of the things that's been really nice, especially for small and medium dealers, and even though like our structures are built as big as cat dealers, no surprise, that's where I started. People like our migration is really soft. It's not. big and painful. We're about to throw the switch February 1st with one dealer. And I realized that when we shut the old system off, they've already got everything and they're already running a whole lot of stuff live in their new visibility system. And all we have to hold is some of the financial transactions on our side until we get the new accounting synced with the old data. And then we just turn it on. And so go live date is in the middle of a week. Yeah. On like a Wednesday morning. Yeah.

We go live and no one's really terrified because we can keep going no matter what.

No

Okay.

Sure. Yeah, let's see. I like learning all the stories. You know, it's funny, like you brought up CODA and it was actually learning about what happened with the DBS CODA thing that encouraged me to see that it was possible to just let. People use the accounting that fit their business best and that they were comfortable with and happy with. And then we would just integrate because that's really how the CAT system works at a lot of the dealerships is an operational system and a finance system. And the finance system only gets financial data. It doesn't know what a part number is or that how many there are. And it just knows the numbers. And that's we follow that same kind of like, oh, if that's if you can do it at that scale, then we can definitely do it. on all scales.

Yeah, let's do it. Thanks, Ron. You're