by By Brian Cruickshank, AAP
Editor, Counterman magazine
RALEIGH, NC — According to Activant Vice President of Marketing Jonathan Gear, on June 4 General Parts Inc. (GPI) announced internally its intention to replace the Activant J-CON store management system with a new point-of-sale system in all GPI-owned store locations.
“We’ve known for the last couple of years that GPI has expressed its desire to create a custom CARQUEST point-of-sale system,” said Gear. “(GPI) informed us that starting relatively soon, it is going to gradually replace the J-CONs within the GPI-owned CARQUEST stores. This is not a surprise to us and is obviously disappointing. They have been warning us for a while that it would be coming.”
However, Gear acknowledged that Activant would not lose all of the CARQUEST business. The company will retain all of the GPI cataloging and A-DIS Warehouse business.
Gear believes that this new CARQUEST point-of-sale system is based on icarz technology.
When contacted, icarz President Jesse Hermann said, “I acknowledge that GPI is a strategic customer of icarz for our PartsWatch product. The next release of this product, PartsWatch Version 2.0, is scheduled for general availability in the next few weeks. With regard to GPI or any customer’s specific intentions, it’s up to them to disclose as they see fit. We consider all customer interactions and information to be confidential.”
A representative at GPI declined to comment.
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