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DMS Options

Mr. Duke - I know yours was an older posting, but I was wondering which DMS you chose if you did indeed leave Autosoft. We are with Quorum right now and are looking to switch. We have talked to DT, ADP, and R&R, and we are having a hard time separating the fact from the hype. R&R and ADP have good products but cost and long term contracts have us unsure. DT has the best price by far with their rapid expansion we are worried about their tech support and cust service. Anything you're willing to share I would love to hear.

Hi Roger, we went with Dealer Track and did the conversion in April. Here is my opinion.

Reynolds - We were with Reynolds for 20 years. Its a good system, yet very expensive. They do not like to integrate as good as Dealer Track in my opinion. Support is average. We used their CRM system, and it was nice the DMS and CRM integrated. But as you mentioned it is very costly and they handcuff you. We left them in 2008 for ACS over price. The exit from Reynolds was less than professional on their part, more bully and arrogant on their part telling me we would go under without them and we would be back! They locked us out of a lot of our data.

ACS - we switched to ACS in Jan of 2009. That data we were able to transfer from Reynolds to ACS was a smooth transition on ACS's part. For a much smaller DMS I was impressed with their support. Live people on the 2nd ring. We got to know many of them personally. The system did 80% of everything Reynolds would do. Yet they were very limited with integration with 3rd party vendors. The cost was fantastic, we went from a $16,000 a month bill with Reynolds, to a $1,700 a month bill with ACS. That was a big eye opener. We did just fine with ACS from 2009 to 2013, we used a smaller CRM, more of an ILM, called Votenza. But we were really missing a full CRM and integration with DMS like we wanted from all vendors.

Dealer Track - we started talking with them this time last year. I went on a search in early 2012 for a new CRM and we choose Dealer Socket after a lot of careful thought. I choose to place the emphasis for our store on CRM, then look at a DMS that would work well with it. Once we decided on Dealer Socket we had already had Dealer Track in mind because of their Open Track bi-directional live integration.

Transition to DT - moving from ACS to DT was a challenge because of how DT accepts data and the formats ACS used. We used DT's recommended vendor to extract our data. It was frustrating but to no fault of DT, more so of the vendor handling our data since the formats are different. They do not have an issue with ADP or Reynolds I was told. When the install team came we had some nightmares with parts and service data transfer and the DT worked very hard to help get all data to match. Thats been the only hiccup so far.

Support - support has been great, we enjoyed people on site for a total of 3 weeks, 1 extra given by DT do to the data transfer issues. I will say at times the support on the phone is average, and i can find the answer in the wiki much faster. But when you get with a support person that is more specific to the issue it has been good. We have had a few issues with the F&I eMenu and Allstate's portal matching up, but we got that fixed.

System - I like it. I like the reports, I like the integration between all our 3rd party vendors, and I like the price! Our team has had a great transition, no real complaints. Techs seem to be ok with it, but of course a tech will never tell you he is "happy". Other than what I think is an average learning curve, some adjustments in processes, we have been very satisfied with Dealer Track after only 3 months.

Hope that helps.
 
Mr. Duke -

Again, thank you for your quick response. We are suffering from "demo fatigue" here but I understand it is necessary. As an office manager I know how important this process and decision is. We have had our department managers attend demos and have had the DMS vendors come back after to answer more questions. Your situation sounds very similar to ours. We had been on no other system but R&R until 2008 when they dropped out of IDMS. We are doing our best to educate ourselves and figure out which system works best for our store.