Article
Kiosk stops pileups at automobile service center
Lallier St-Foy, one of Canada's largest Honda dealers, turned to kiosks to bust lines at its 22 service bays.
September 12, 2006
The writer is editor of selfservice.org.
An auto dealership's service bay is supposed to be a profit center. But, on a bad day, keeping the cars flowing through in a timely manner can be a logistical nightmare. Guy Duplessis knows this well: As the general manager of Lallier Ste-Foy, one of Canada's largest Honda dealers, he supervises 22 service bays on two shifts, with 34 technicians.
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"The problem we had was that everybody, you know when you try to give an appointment to a customer, they all come at the same time in the service department," Duplessis said. "Even if you tell them to come at 8:10, not 8 or 8:20, sometimes there is a big amount of customers waiting in line."
In 2004, he sought the help of CDSoft, a firm that programs software for auto dealers. They collaborated, and the result was Express Check In. The kiosk-based solution allows clients dropping off their automobiles to generate work orders in real-time. It's a big difference compared to the old, form-based system — and it directly benefits the bottom line.
"When the work order is opened, it goes directly into the system so we cannot forget it," Duplessis said. "Before that, a customer could come here and, say they leave a car here over night to be worked on in the morning, and they left an envelope in a certain place describing what they wanted to be done. The supervisor might open the envelope at 9:30 and the customer might want the car done by noon, but we wouldn't have time to do the job."
Customers can find the kiosk inside the service center, along with a greeter and a cup of coffee. CDSoft placed the application on a KIOSK Information Systems Thinman equipped with an IBM Thinkcenter and an overhead digital sign. CDSoft co-founder Richard Deslauriers said the Thinman is rugged enough for the service center environment — and durability was key, since it would mostly run unsupervised. But finding the right hardware wasn't the real challenge.
"Integration with the existing DMS (dealer management system) certainly was, and still is, the biggest challenge in this project," Deslauriers said. "Since nearly 80 percent of all car dealerships in North America use either ADP Elite or Reynold's & Reynold's ERA, we had to create two different interfaces. Most of the software we use is open-source, so we did not want to depend on third party licensing for the emulators and we did not want to use APIs (application programming interfaces) from these suppliers at the moment. So we had to create a totally original way of integration, which even included writing Java emulators."
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Guy Duplessis, general manager of Lallier Ste-Foy, with the Express Check In kiosk |
Though he's never heard of kiosk-based software for making service centers more efficient, Finlay said online service center check-in has a growing following for similar reasons.
"It's very convenient and effective for the dealership," he said. "It used to be a lot harder. You'd get these mad rushes and have to schedule your day around it. That's why these are great: it streamlines operations and helps dealers operate more efficiently. It's a very competitive business. There's always another dealer you can take it to, so you have to do it right the first time and do it when you promise it will be done."
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The software interface, designed by CDSoft, reminds customers of manufacturer-recommended services. |
"What I learned is that the machine can sell 1.6 per hour," Duplessis said. "Why can't a service advisor do the same?"
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