A Dealer Management System Which Truly Eliminates Silos of Information…Finally
Is your back office a mixture of disconnected silos? Learn how to connect the 6 most common silos of information for heavy equipment dealers.
You’ve seen the videos of crew teams who all row together in perfect rhythm and symmetry. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. Each person sitting in the boat serves a very specific purpose when rowing. Rowing to perfection. Even the tiniest deviation of coordinating movements with everyone else will slow the boat down. Now compare that to your business. What does it take to row the boat for heavy equipment dealers?
There is nothing more powerful in any organization than having all employees rowing fiercely in the same direction. For many organizations, nobody is rowing in the same direction because there are still silos of information across departments. Not only are the employees not rowing in the same direction, but the executive team isn’t engaged at the forefront steering the boat.
NetSuite published an article which describes six common back office silo situations for a typical company. According to the article, “The back office of many practices is still a mixture of disconnected silos of information. These disconnected silos are connected with manual effort – wasting time and creating inefficiencies. Many practices have at least four and possibly five or even six silos of information.” We’ve taken their silos and made them applicable to heavy equipment dealers below:
Silo 1 – Sales
Opportunity, up-sell, and quote management, sales forecasting, order management, fulfillment and even sales commissions. This is all happening in your company if you are a heavy equipment dealer, but maybe in a bubble. No one else has access to this information if it’s on your salesperson’s PC or phone.
Silo 2 – Marketing
Planning and executing the right marketing programs is a critical first step in building a robust sales pipeline. Where most companies fall short is in making that vital link between marketing campaigns and sales execution. If your marketing team is operating on the catch all tool of spreadsheets, or in other siloed programs, it’s time to connect it to sales and operations.
Silo 3 – Service Management
More complex engagements and assignments require tools to help plan individual tasks, tools that are designed to allocate tasks across a team with milestone delivery information. This is often done with a project management tool that has been purchased or again through the use of spreadsheets.
Silo 4 – Invoice and Billing
This is obviously the engine that underpins the back office. It is the system that understands the billing profiles and agreements. It is the system that calculates the invoices and provides the accounting entries for revenue recognition. In fact, some heavy equipment dealers have tried to ‘bend’ their core accounting platform to serve this purpose alone.
Silo 5 – Core Accounting Platform
The core accounting platform will hold valuable credit history information as well as core transactional entries for our clients. It can provide information that could be very valuable in deciding whether to service a client who always pays late.
Silo 6 – Customer Information Management
This provides the actual record of client engagement and management. It is possibly another of those ‘gold rush’ systems that was first purchased and deployed without regard for how it integrated with the rest of the business. These systems record client engagement details and help manage potential opportunities.
Velosio DMS
Velosio DMS is a modern end-to-end cloud solution for heavy equipment dealers. Built on NetSuite’s powerful business management platform, Velosio DMS automates sales, service, parts, financial management, reporting, CRM and distribution.
The Velosio dealer management solution provides you the ability to:
- Automate and streamline business processes across the enterprise, including Sales, Service, Parts, Financial Management, Reporting, CRM, and Distribution.
- Build stronger, more profitable relationships with your clients by improving the customer experience.
- Have access to business-critical information at any time, from any place, on any device.
NetSuite’s “One Data Model”
Where most DMS companies lead with specific pre-built integrations, Velosio DMS utilizes NetSuite’s “One Data Model” which simplifies integration to partner systems and delivers complete visibility to customer activity, thereby eliminating silos of information.
Breaking down the silos of information is not an easy task for any organization; however, the avoidance of these issues will be more detrimental to the employees and ultimately the overall health of the organization. Learn how Velosio DMS can help by modernizing the customer experience and optimizing sales, marketing and service operations. Check out our fact sheet or learn more about the integration with Advectus by watching this video.
Best regards,
Hersch Patel, CPA.CITP
Managing Director, Consulting Services,Velosio
About Hersch
Hersch Patel, CPA.CITP, is the Managing Director of Consulting Services for Velosio. With more than 19 years of experience in the areas of management consulting, managing and leading business applications implementations, Hersch has an indepth understanding of business strategy, business process, business development, and system control design. He specializes in leading teams which plan and execute business technology projects for the purpose of reducing costs, increasing revenue and improving efficiency. Many projects Hersch and his team lead enable individual clients to realize millions of dollars in cost savings annually. Hersch has also traveled across the U.S. and internationally, leading implementations of business applications and management consulting projects for numerous clients from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Hersch has a Bachelor’s Science degree in Business Administration with a specialization in accountancy from Miami University, and is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
