BUENA PARK, Calif. Autologue Computer Systems Inc. has entered into an asset purchase agreement to acquire the Auto Cube Business Intelligence Application Software from GoTo Solutions in Cleveland, Ohio.
Autologue has retained software engineer Tony Quinn for continued development of the Auto Cube product.
The need for a product of this magnitude in the automotive aftermarket has never been more in-demand, according to Jim Franco, CEO of Autologue. The sophistication today of parts distributors in the automotive aftermarket has created a market for a business intelligence product of this caliber, he says.
“Our customers have been relying for years on the limited reporting information from their legacy systems, [which] in most cases, are 25-30 years old," said Franco. "Some of our forward-thinking customers have been forced to utilize manual exporting of data to products like Excel to further analyze the performance of their businesses. These tasks can be very time-consuming, sometimes requiring days of work to arrive at a final result, one report at a time.”
Autologue now has a solution for these customers, Franco explains.
“The Auto Cube model uses a complete nightly data stream upload from any management system," he said. "Now, every morning you will have meaningful data in multiple, graphical formats — i.e. column lists, pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and even gauges, to produce a ‘dashboard-like’ presentation of your data.”
Franco added that with Auto Cube, any report you can imagine is possible. He cited a few examples, such as:
· What is the merchandise return percentage for all my customers? From most to least and vice versa,
· What are the busiest times of the day for scheduling counter personnel and drivers?
· How much have the sales of a particular line dropped off, by date range? And also, by customer, even down to a specific part number
· Outside salesman performance by day and by customer
· Sales for the counter people by time of day
· Multi-store visibility of sales and profit for all stores, including inventory values on one screen, daily
"There’s no limit to what our customers can ask of their system using all the sales data generated on a daily basis," Franco said. "All the reports are presented in an easy-to-read format, designed by the customers themselves. No more relying on canned reports that almost always lack a particular bit of information."
Autologue will offer Auto Cube to its current customer base, in addition to marketing the product to jobbers and WDs using any management system.