Managing Your Dealership

PFW IntelliDealer Product Support

PFW IntelliDealer Product Support enhances a dealership's aftermarket product support effort by assisting dealerships in aspects of business that are of bottom-line significance. Product Support aids the sale of service labor and the management of equipment assets and parts.

• Equipment
• Service
• Parts

Equipment

Equipment provides a comprehensive management point from which to view and maintain your equipment data, assisting your product support's effort to improve your customers' dealership experience.

PFW IntelliDealer Product Support Equipment is integral to your dealership's effort in meeting customer needs with regard to equipment handling. As it is imperative that you are able to efficiently manage your fleets and maintain -- or improve -- customer-service levels, service problems such as incomplete equipment information and confusion regarding your inventory should be eliminated. All of this is critical when you consider that your product support effort -- and its relevance to absorption -- is redundant unless market penetration is achieved. Product Support Equipment helps you effectively manage information regarding machine location and its movement and use, as well as machine specifications, options, and parts. An improved knowledge base for equipment inventory is a high priority, as your Product Support Sales Representatives will be more "equipment savvy", and therefore offer improved customer service.

Increase Equipment Management Potential
Product Support Equipment helps you manage all aspects of equipment distribution and give your customers the answers they need. The equipment profile allows you to maintain your equipment inventory and access critical details such as costing, machine hours, configuration, PFW eServices sales information, machine history, and make and model information. Your product support personnel are empowered by Equipment's easy access to a depth of information, such as machine specifications, supplier and financial information, base and option prices, attachments, parts, and machine images or other multimedia.

Accurate equipment quotes are critical to customer service, and these quotes can include trade-in details, parts, and miscellaneous charges. You can convert the quotes directly and easily into an invoice once the customer accepts the quote, and a built-in interface simplifies quote accessibility through PFW eServices.

Product Support Strength
Your product support effort is made more professional through the quality invoices that can be produced. This is also useful in that all of your invoice information is stored in one place, making your dealership more organized and efficient. As well, quotes can be accepted into invoices, and efficiency is created here, as re-keying is not necessary. All accounting entries are handled as well -- in order to meet all of your invoicing needs. Invoice history is also available and lets you perform an invoice search by date, invoice number, type, or customer. You can impress your customers with your ability to fax, print, or e-mail their invoices.

Equipment also allows you to quickly set up and maintain service agreements, which help ensure that your sales and service staff maintain regular communication with their customers through the scheduling and performance of maintenance, the definition of the programs to be sold, and the assignment of equipment to the agreement.

Shipping transportation methods are more complex and critical than ever, and with Equipment, your product support team can keep pace. All of your shipping details can be kept current and organized, as well as the movement of equipment through traffic receipts, allowing you to post shipping, stock, and customer site information, and add descriptive comments. You need to know where your shipments have gone, when they went out, who shipped them, and when they were received and, with Equipment, you do.

Service

Superior service is an important factor in what keeps your customers returning to your dealership. With PFW IntelliDealer's Product Support Service, enhance your dealership's customer relations by keeping service details more organized, accurate, and complete.

PFW IntelliDealer Product Support Service helps you deliver the quality product support that is integral to the interaction between your dealership and your customers. A product support department's goals should be to reduce operating costs for owners, protect the residual value of equipment and, ultimately, provide an adequate return on the product support investment. The broad goal is the proper operation of equipment, and therefore dealerships need to have the necessary equipment and parts available -- and a flexible and integrated management system to oversee this.

Service aids in the optimization of service labor, and helps to increase the quality of your product support program. With Service, dealership staff can form better relationships with their customers through the delivery of better and more timely service, and by overseeing the finance and administration of product maintenance programs.

Manage Service Data
A high-quality source of information is available with Service, a source that includes data concerning machine population, detail, and usage, customer profiles, technician availability, work-order reconciliation, resource management, shipping, and equipment tracking. Included in Service is service work-order maintenance, management and technician views, a flexible and integrated quoting system, the implementation of job codes, time card and work-order integration, service agreements that help you meet your dealership's service-labor potential, and the tracking of the current and historical movement of equipment.

Efficiency increases, and the consequent dollar savings, are attainable through Service, as it allows you to keep track of the service-time associated with -- and the details of -- work orders. As well, Service gives your technicians views of a wide range of information, with full detail such as machine service history, work-order history and work-order summaries. In order to simplify the work-order generation process, you can define job codes. Also, stay up-to-date on work in progress, and work-order details like customer information, work required, and the dollar value of the order.

Improved Customer Relations and Retention
Service helps you coordinate technician schedules, which smooths operations, increases efficiency and, through its included work-order assignment capability, assists the service department in cleaning up stray work orders, which reduces customer callbacks and frustration. As well, create accurate equipment service quotes -- containing labor costs, required parts, and miscellaneous charges -- and relay them to your customers by creating orders in PFW eServices.

Parts

PFW IntelliDealer Product Support Parts helps you manage your parts inventory and streamline your business processes. Know exactly where your parts are, where they're going, and which ones are in the greatest demand.

PFW IntelliDealer Product Support Parts gives users the ability to utilize order-formula codes and view parts sales, as well as view and maintain parts profiles, quotes, invoices, and invoice history. With Parts, it's simple to sell parts to work orders, keep track of the sales history of each part, and look up parts for your customers. In order to help meet your inventory requirements, the Parts lookup screen features a link to the PFW PartFinder facility. Users attain a new level of parts-ordering control and improve operations through parts sourcing control of those hard-to-find parts.

Integration
In addition to its Product Support integration, Parts is linked with PFW IntelliDealer as a whole: in Management Central, see the top parts items that have sold this year; in Financial Management, see a detailed invoice that can be printed, e-mailed, or faxed for customer or internal use and, conversely, take advantage of Parts' account-entry information that is up-to-date; and in Customer Care, drill down on customer numbers for a parts purchases list by date, invoice number, part number, or description, or create a marketing campaign based on customers with outstanding parts balances of greater than $1000.

As well, Parts works in concert with manufacturer-based parts catalogs, is interfaced with PFW's Signature Pad technology -- which captures signatures directly through sales ordering -- and other PFW products like PFW eServices. As an example, you can specify that a quote should be displayed in PFW eServices. This allows you to extend dealership processes to your customers, who can, through their PFW eServices account, conveniently view and accept new or historical quotes, or request a requote.

Streamline Processes
As a result of this integration, business practices and workflows can be made more efficient. As an example, authorized staff working in Parts can access the customer's current accounts receivable balance and, as well, can view a detailed breakdown by account/aging period and the balance amount. Also, with Parts, you can accept a quote directly from the quote header, and transform it to an invoice or initiate an inquiry for a parts request. Additionally, the work order parts requisition function allows users to switch modes in order to sell parts directly to service work orders.

Parts' alternate charge capability gives you internal billing flexibility, so you can debit a sales order to any G/L account, allowing you to, for example, charge an operator's manual directly to the inventory unit by entering a stock number and its corresponding G/L account number, or charge shop supplies directly to the service department expense account by entering the G/L account number.

Inventory Sourcing
For those customers that have checked their branch locations for an item and have cross-referenced substitutes, Parts is integrated with PFW PartFinder, a searchable database where searches can be conducted by whole or partial part number, as well as by country, state or province. PFW PartFinder provides access to nearly 2 million parts, representing thousands of different vendor lines, and is an efficient way to find and sell used, discontinued, or specialty equipment parts.