Bud Karakey
One of the trends we’re seeing in 2012-2013 is decreased paper page output, and movement towards an electronic mobile format. This trend is being seen throughout the industry; both Generation X and Y have embraced electronic media and will continue to drive this trend. As a result, document management will be the most important thing for processing, and getting those formats out there beyond paper output is going to be the challenge. How do you do it easier and cleaner for those 20 and 30-somethings that are using their tablets, smart phones and other electronic devices to read the page content? My feelings are this is happening across the industry in a big way and will continue to do so.
The big challenge is putting a printed format into a clean, viable mobile solution that’s easily accessible to the clients. It’s more than taking a PDF and putting it on a Website or emailing it. There has to be a central print repository available that is easily accessible by these devices; which very few of the document management solutions are currently providing. There must be a point where people take notice of these trends and provide an easier way to get it completed. In the computer industry, tablets and other mobile platforms are the wave of the future. Our industry must prepare to put solutions out there for those devices; which we see a lot of in office environments and health care facilities.
At BEI Services we continue to provide solutions that help dealerships increase service performance. With page based outputs getting smaller, it is that much more important to ensure that dealers are squeezing the most profit from every page they can. Dealers using our Advanced Comparative Reporting, Territory Management and Technician Compensation products can be ensured they have the best tools to help them stay as profitable as they can be in service. These combined strategies we put together continue to help companies thrive throughout these tough economic times and allow them to improve every day. As you’ve seen in our Customer Spotlight profiles, the dealers who are using us are obtaining phenomenal results. The Customer Spotlight ads running in ENX and Image Source magazine illustrate specifically how our customers are improving their service performance and bottom line through the use of our products. There will be a different Customer Spotlight profile in each magazine every month showing their personal improvement. It’s a campaign that I don’t believe anyone else in our industry has ever done before, and one we are very proud of.
We’re doing a number of things to help dealers be successful in 2012 and 2013 beyond the scope of our normal products. We have created “Service Reporting Software” which allows companies to dispatch service calls and manage technicians, and we provide it for free! We’ll then collect and process the data obtained from SRS so the dealers can understand their true costs per page on every device they service. We have even made this product completely wireless so users can manage their service departments on wireless mobile devices for a small fee. They can open service calls, arrive to calls, and close service calls completely remotely. Dealers can even review previous call histories and order parts wirelessly on smart phones and tablets very quickly and easily. Our wireless fees are very inexpensive, ranging from $12.95 to $14.95 per month per user. That’s going to streamline the flow of information throughout the company’s service department, making it much more proficient and productive.
We’ve already come out with our intuitive service territory management product that’s done phenomenal things for company’s service territories. It dramatically reduced their cost, and has increased productivity because it allows for the easy creation of performance-based technician territories. We are now planning to do something like that with sales territories as well. By providing both sales and service statistics and analytics in a visual manner on a map, sales management will have the capability to create “smart” sales territories effortlessly. They can include or exclude any types of machines and manufactures they want, target machines by age, performance, high or low volume and even target unprofitable machines. They can even layer territories for multiple reps in the same geographical area. Having the combination of a sales and service territory management system allows dealers to make smart decisions in the field as it relates to territories.
