Customer Feature - John Martin Group

Henry Eaves – system manager at John Martin Group commented on their relationship with Kerridge since they had their first Autoline Revision 6 system installed in April 1989. Throughout the 15 years they have progressed through several of the revisions of The Autoline System.

Recently in June 2004 they became the Scottish pilot site for our new release of Autoline Revision 8.35 9304.

The John Martin group consists of 13 franchises with over 400 users who are located in 20 different dealerships which stretch from Fraserborough to Selkirk in the Scottish borders.

“As a natural progression from 8090, we knew that Rev 8.35 9304 would give us the ability to control bodyshop and call centre business processes. We worked closely with Kerridge to develop the software for the Bodyshop Management module to ensure that all the functionality fulfilled our business requirements. The specific advances that are now available in Workshop Loading include such features as better control of the technicians and courtesy car scheduling. This has actually enabled us to reduce the number of courtesy cars on the fleet due to this facility.

The John Martin Group operates 5 separate bodyshop locations which all work to central standard procedures. The new system enables head office to run a principal reporting routine to look at productive efficiencies and throughput of work within all of the locations.

The CCM module runs an efficient contact centre which operates with 24 staff to maintain customer contact by predominantly making out-bound aftersales calls. The integrated soft switch allows the team to also take inbound calls with caller identification. The team benefit greatly by using the tasks lists within the CCM module which is an instant and constant reminder for the daily tasks.

The upgrade process itself went very smoothly and we have gained a great deal of benefits by introducing 9304. It is a very stable and consistent product. This is a great credit to Bob Gray’s Release Management department who have worked very hard to direct a system which Kerridge can say is the most impressive they have ever developed.

Currently all customer facing staff use the ‘My Desktop’ functionality. This is working very well and improving customer service levels. The rest of the JMG team are using the system with classic style menus. Lessons learnt from previous upgrades are used here so that too much change too quickly is not encountered. This will be rolled out as time progresses. But it is an example of how flexible the system is to meet the various requirements.

The Showroom module is a very effective module and has been introduced to all 120 sales staff who are using it for prospecting and organising their schedules. They are also intensively using the quotation facility to provide professional documents to the customer. This enables the group to enforce consistent standards across all of the franchises and ensure that customer service remains high regardless of which dealership a customer was dealing with.

The next step is to enhance the HTML reporting which will be used to extract the data onto the JMG extranet. All senior management currently use Report Generator and use menu reporting. By exporting information to a central point the reports can then be accessed by all.

Taken from Kerridge Update North.