Dealership Intranet - MySQL/PHP Database vs Sharepoint

[andwrig]

Hello All

Looking for some feedback regarding dealership intranets for things like sales reporting and tracking, F&I reporting and tracking, service & parts reporting and tracking, HR issues, dealership message board, etc. Who has one that they really like? Did you build it yourself? Did you hire an outside company or programmer? Does it pull data from your DMS? What platform are you using? Is it web based or hosted on a local server? I'm looking for ideas and programmer/vendor suggestions. I'm considering Stone Eagle for F&I data extraction. We currently use an Excel spreadsheet.

Thanks - Andy

 

[mattwatson81]

Will you be at NADA? Come by our booth and see me. Maybe I can help you figure this out.

Hello All

Looking for some feedback regarding dealership intranets for things like sales reporting and tracking, F&I reporting and tracking, service & parts reporting and tracking, HR issues, dealership message board, etc. Who has one that they really like? Did you build it yourself? Did you hire an outside company or programmer? Does it pull data from your DMS? What platform are you using? Is it web based or hosted on a local server? I'm looking for ideas and programmer/vendor suggestions. I'm considering Stone Eagle for F&I data extraction. We currently use an Excel spreadsheet.

Thanks - Andy

 

[andwrig]

Matt

I appreciate the offer but I am not attending NADA this year.

Andy

 

[ArtMorris]

I worked with StoneEagle because they are the official data integration team for Toyota Financial Services. I have to say that the way they have handled integration with ERAccess is very slick. Reynolds would call it a hostile integration, but that's just marketing spin. It works correctly and reliably.

However, they take data from my DMS and put it into the F&I sales tool that they host on their web servers. If I wanted to do F&I reporting and only needed my employees to be able to view it I wouldn't pay StoneEagle to extract the data. I can pull the data myself with Query Builder and leave it on our internal network. F&I data like this should stay within your building if at all possible.

I assist with a lot of reporting & trending and I do most of it with Query Builder and Excel.

What DMS do you use?

 

[andwrig]

I worked with StoneEagle because they are the official data integration team for Toyota Financial Services. I have to say that the way they have handled integration with ERAccess is very slick. Reynolds would call it a hostile integration, but that's just marketing spin. It works correctly and reliably.

However, they take data from my DMS and put it into the F&I sales tool that they host on their web servers. If I wanted to do F&I reporting and only needed my employees to be able to view it I wouldn't pay StoneEagle to extract the data. I can pull the data myself with Query Builder and leave it on our internal network. F&I data like this should stay within your building if at all possible.

I assist with a lot of reporting & trending and I do most of it with Query Builder and Excel.

What DMS do you use?

We are on Reynolds and Reynolds ERA...

 

[ArtMorris]

Me too. What kind of information are you looking to get? I doubt you'll need to pay someone to extract it for you...

 

[Jarrett]

We use Salesforce.com to accomplish this very business objective. Unfortunately there is no supported interface for Reynolds. The reporting, dashboard and workflow abilities in Salesforce.com's platform are tremendous.

With either sharepoint, MySQL / PHP or any other logic platform you first have to inject the data. After the difficult part of mapping the data is completed, you then need to build the reporting interface. With Force.com this is accomplished for you at a reasonable expense per user/seat. Initially I had built a Intranet portal for our Dealer Group on FreeBSD/PHP/MySQL (We where on ERA at the time). It worked very well, however the owner decided a custom programmed application was not suitable in the business, as there is no one but me able to support it. It was at that time we moved our customization platform the force.com.

 

[andwrig]

Me too. What kind of information are you looking to get? I doubt you'll need to pay someone to extract it for you...

Sales and F&I information - Front and Back end grosses, units
Service - Hours/tech & advisor, Sales and Gross $/tech & advisor, RO Count,
Parts - Sales and Gross $/counterman
HR - total compensation per employee, basic employee information including start date, job title, description

I'd like to extract it and dump it into a spreadsheet using XML or Macros and i'd like it to be as automated as possible using auto-scripts, etc.

Am I a little too ambitious in my thinking? It would be great if Reynolds did this type of stuff for us and put it in a format that was easy to extract and most importantly, trend. Reynolds is awful at showing us trend information. That's really what I working towards...