News Archives

Bigger and Better

PFW IntelliDealer’s Ongoing Enhancements

PFW Password - Fall 2005 In addition to Used Equipment Evaluation and Rental in PFW IntelliDealer, PFW remains focussed on developing IntelliDealer’s strength and scope as our customers continue to make platform transitions:

Power the Parts Counter with Customer Discounts
In order to improve pricing “granularity,” PFW has migrated Customer Discounts to IntelliDealer. The development of this feature was aided by customer consultation, and allows for a pricing matrix to price parts by customer, part number, part categories—similar to source and class—and start and end dates. As well, the system determines whether the price was calculated as a percentage of cost, list price or even a fixed price.

Customer discounts can be systematically applied, so that the parts counter no longer needs to memorize discount parameters. The convenience is there to apply discounts on any scale: by part number all the way up to manufacturer. Currently, the system is being expanded to include labor pricing.

Parts Consignment
Thanks to PFW’s commitment to completing the feature set of our web-based management system, IntelliDealer users receive greater inventory sophistication and flexibility. With Parts Consignment, users can identify parts and quantities that have been placed on consignment with a customer. As well, this feature also works well for field trucks. Once a part has been placed on consignment, the “reserved” field on the part register will be adjusted by the quantity.

Customer Convenience: Marketing Forms with HTML Support
Thanks to a customer suggestion and PFW’s flexibility, dealerships can now increase the scope of their customer-distributed forms. When creating a form in PFW IntelliDealer Marketing, HTML formatting is now supported [Fig. 1, Fig. 2], which adds another dimension to e-mail campaigns. Logos, website and e-mail links, promotions, and more dynamic marketing content are all achievable within this new technology. As well, links to an external image server are possible.

Region Support: Enhanced Data Sorting
Larger PFW customers may have branches within a division within a company. They may then assign branches to geographic regions which need to be recognized—for searching purposes—within the PFW system. Consequently, a “Region” field was added to a system configuration table that assigns a branch to a region. So now, when a user searches for customers or parts, they can select a region—the default is the region to which their branch is assigned—to search by. PFW thought that this feature was useful to a “critical mass” of customers and so it was recently integrated into PFW IntelliDealer.

Will Landry, IT Manager of Finch Services, Inc., which has six locations in Maryland and Pennsylvania, says, “I can certainly see how this will benefit new and novice users. This new feature will allow for more efficient equipment searching within regional facilities and facilities with similar types of equipment. For large multi-site dealerships, this new feature is a nice addition to PFW IntelliDealer.”

MICR Printing Support
Now available in both the Dealership Management System and PFW IntelliDealer, and in response to customer requests, the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) printing system is a character-recognition system (used by banks for checks) that uses special ink and characters. MICR provides a secure, high-speed method of scanning and processing information. To print magnetic ink, dealerships will require a laser printer that accepts MICR toner. Call PFW Sales for printer requirements and specifications.

PFW IntelliDealer Internal Messaging
As of PFW system version R6V03, a new message system has been incorporated into the IntelliDealer application suite [Fig. 3]. Similar to the break message process that currently exists in the Dealership Management System, this internal messaging system allows IntelliDealer users to communicate with fellow users without having to exit IntelliDealer and disrupt their workflow.

PFW IntelliDealer Custom Screens
PFW release R6V03 also introduces powerful new screen-control features. Now, a customized tab order and customized screen designs [Fig. 4] are possible for authorized users. Any required information from the customer, equipment, parts, or vendor master files can be imported into these customized IntelliDealer screens.

As seen here, PFW’s software development is a dynamic process. Currently, IntelliDealer is experiencing an ongoing expansion, achieved by presenting existing systems within the web client and completing IntelliDealer’s present feature set. As a result, users will continue to benefit from a system that provides increased data control and the role-specific assistance that they—and their customers—require. When the migration is complete, IntelliDealer’s growth will only slow, not stop. PFW thinks that IntelliDealer fits into your bright future.