Assessing under the hood
Pedders growth strategy is focused on increasing the number of franchises and encourage their trade accounts in becoming their own franchised stores. While they often have deep automotive expertise, the demands of running a business can be challenging. Providing potential franchisors with a ready to go and easy to use business management system provided a competitive edge in closing more deals.
Simon Richardson, Senior Executive of technology and systems at Pedders said “Our former solution was partially integrated to our ERP and removing that ERP was going to leave our job card system (store based vehicle and customer workflow management) standing by itself. We went to market for a new ERP as we wanted to ensure that our workshop mechanical management system and customer management system (Electrical Job Card) was fully integrated to our ERP. Though there was nothing specifically wrong with our past platform, we were unable to invest in that platform and introduced a lot of new functions to improve our workflow.”
Historically, Pedders maintained a mixture of an online and offline systems which were very manual and paper based, especially for their technicians completing the vehicle assessments. This resulted in a lack of visibility, clarity and accessibility of their business status, inventory and customers globally.
While their head office needed to understand the overall picture of all franchises, each franchisee desired to have more access to insights about their business, customer’s history and inventory. Without the facility to collect insights and trace a customer’s history across appointments and franchises, it was difficult for Pedder’s to follow up on customer interactions to generate leads.
Our previous system was very poor at customer communication and consisted of very little functionality to enable it. It realistically only sent out an SMS reminder after six months for the next check-up. There was nothing to encourage customer communication and no return path or follow up for those SMS. Our customers were even unable to book an appointment online.” Said Mr Richardson
Being in the automotive industry, Pedders deal with over a 1000 car models every day, each involving hundreds of different parts which are by various manufacturers and dealers. Instant easy access to this information is vital when servicing their customer’s vehicles. Technicians also required a location to easily add any new information or knowledge they may come across in their everyday work. This includes new methods of completing their work, critical safety warnings and tricks of the trade.