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Is ADP the Cadillac of DMS's?

Jun 26, 2014
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First Name
John
For the past year and a half the Ford Motor Company has been after us to electronically submit our Dealer Financial Statement via the FBMI "Ford Business Management Intelligence", rather that the way it's been done for the last 15 years, DCS2. I struggled with this new process for some time before I managed to get two Ford Motor Co representatives in my office on a conference call with ADP Support. My claims to Ford, that ADP could only produce a printed version of the statement, in other words it cannot be archived digitally, fell on deaf ears. That is until the ADP Support representative told them that in fact, no, they do not yet have the ability to do what Ford asks. Furthermore, they had no idea went that revolutionary technology would be available to ADP dealers.
 
Well I thought pretty much all DMS systems today submit the FS to the manufacture. What ADP system are you on? I know we do it.

As for it being the Cadillac of DMS's I will have to keep that off here, but if you require a contract to keep dealers on your system that says a lot.
 
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Well I thought pretty much all DMS systems today submit the FS to the manufacture. What ADP system are you on? I know we do it.

As for it being the Cadillac of DMS's I will have to keep that off here, but if you require a contract to keep dealers on your system that says a lot.


We're on the Drive system and yes, we do submit the FS electronically via DCS but are not capable creating any kind of PDF, non-paper version.
 
The first computer I saw in a dealership was an IBM mainframe. It had it's own room (about 10X14 ft.) and own air conditioning unit. It was the late 60's and it took mainframe, with it's memory, to keep track of the thousands of parts that we stocked for two franchises. Compared to today, it could do very little. Sadly, the interface hasn't changed much. If you could run those, you could be up to speed in a few hours on an ADP or Reynolds system.

Dealer Specialties acquired a DMS company and I had hopes the would come out with a modern DMS but haven't heard anything lately.
 
I have been in the technology business all of my life and my ex's family was in the automobile business and the issue is that it is the dealer's that allow ADP and R&R walk all over them. I know that dealerships have a large amount of smart people that work for them but sometimes they can be very dumb and swayed by the "local" sales process that the large dealership focused companies use. I could write a book on this alone.

I have worked with technology at a fair amount of stores and another problem is the fact that dealerships often treat technology companies poorly and those companies in turn will not work with a dealership. A lot of the better technology companies won't work with automobile dealerships.
 
I would avoid CDK like the plague. Their share holders are demanding dividends and they will get you to sign a contract on anything and everything, locking you in to whatever they can. I've been using ADP/CDK for 6 years now and it's insane how bloated and archaic their software is. I was a software developer before getting into the automotive industry and I cannot comprehend how anyone at that company can sleep at night charging people money for this duck tape/bailing wire cluster. Not to mention it's incredibly INSECURE. Not a Cadillac. Ever heard of a rat rod?