Using your Dealer Management System to drive results through business intelligence

Published: April 2007
By Steve Roberts, Ebbon-Dacs

Consider the vast amount of data about your business that is captured in a dealer management system. The DMS stores data about margins, departmental performance, customer behaviour, process efficiency and trends within the business. The challenge is how to get at it quickly and cheaply so that it can be used to your advantage.

Ebbon-Dacs recognise this requirement and we have worked with our customers to develop a Business Intelligence toolkit to organise, access, analyse and present your data to provide deep insight into your business and to support informed decisions that drive performance and results.

In our DMS every step in the business process is recorded and time stamped; this provides an ideal foundation for Business Intelligence.

The EDVantage business intelligence dashboard provides the information your business needs at the right time, to the right people, in the right format.

Major Benefits to the Dealer Group

  • Graphical representation of the data allows you to identify relationships and trends in the data more easily than by looking at tables of figures. The old adage of a picture painting a thousand words is particularly relevant to the volume and complexity of data generated by a modern business.
  • The data is presented at the right level of detail for the user, from board level to functional managers. Data is summarised for a top level overview. If this reveals an item that requires further investigation a multi level drill facility allows greater detail to be displayed for a more in depth analysis. Interactive reports allow entry of multiple criteria, sorting and filtering.
  • Business Intelligence is integrated into EDVantage and is accessed very simply through the menus. The users do not require any specialist expertise. There is no requirement to export data into third party systems or spreadsheets in order to manipulate the data and no need for specialist analysts to administer these. A common problem has always been consistency between these different silos of data. With EDVantage there is a single version of the truth.
  • As the Business Intelligence dashboard is in EDVantage users with the necessary permissions can access the reports as and when they require, even from remote locations provided that the user has an internet connection. Issues of distribution and security are handled though the application.
  • The information is real time, therefore decisions can reflect up to the minute developments in the business rather than being based on out of date reports.
  • There are a suite of standard key performance indicators which cover all functional areas of the business. There is an ability to enter metrics so that performance against target can be measured. Projections based on current performance are also given.
  • The Business Intelligence dashboard is built using Microsoft tools which have tight integration to Microsoft Office allowing the ability to export into MS Excel for example. As future releases of Microsoft’s reporting and Business Intelligence platforms become available so the Business Intelligence capabilities within EDVantage will continue to advance.

Download this white paper (in Adobe PDF format)