Shop-Ware vs HITS: Which is a better fit?

Phil C.: Hi, I'm Phil. I'm here to tell you why Shop-Ware is going to make your life a lot easier and it's the best choice for your point of sale at your automotive shop? Click the link below to see how Shop-Ware stacks up against the competition. Before choosing Shop-Ware, I did have Mitchell, and it was basically just starting to get outdated just looking for an option where we could be paperless and integrate digital inspections along with the actual invoices. And then similar story with a company called R.O. Writer. We had two stores at the time, one was on Mitchell, one was on R.O. Writer, and didn't like either one of them very much, just because they weren't adding new features and advancing with the times, I guess. So I did look at quite a few different options. We looked at Tekmetric and we looked at Protractor, were the two main ones that I looked at. Both had some pretty decent products, but it just seemed like it was a little too clunky with Protractor. There's just way too many options. The learning curve to get adept with it was a little too steep. And then Tekmetric just was in their very early stages and they didn't have all the features that I needed. So I chose Shop-Ware for a number of reasons, a couple of those being, one, it was web-based, truly web-based, no installs needed on any device, which definitely helps being a multi-shop location. Just I'm able to check in on all the stores no matter where I am. So that was a big one. Also, being paperless. There's a lot of management systems that claim to be paperless, but Shop-Ware was truly built from the ground up thinking in the paperless mindset. So that just makes everything work a little bit smoother than some of the other companies out there. And then they also have new features that haven't really been on any other point of sale that I've found, such as the parts optimizer to really dial in your parts margins in a very calculated algorithm that they have that makes it work out pretty well, rather than your standard matrix. And then also just some other items like being able to take any past service and make that a canned job so you're just avoiding redundant work, which has really streamlined our process, making our advisors a lot more efficient. Those are the main things. And then also just integrating the actual invoice, technician notes, pictures, videos, and the inspection are all in one platform, rather than having your main point of sale and then an inspection platform on top of that. This is all seamless and is altogether. So that just was a huge feature for us, just making sure that we're streamlined. And then it's a lot easier to teach somebody this process versus trying to teach them two different software. Just teaching them one, it's a lot easier to be able to get somebody onboarded within a couple of hours and they're pretty adept at the system. Getting started with Shop-Ware was actually really simple. It was just a simple login and they give you a free trial that you can get in there and really see what the software looks like. They give you 30 days with that. Their support team is really great as far as showing you the ins and outs of the software. They have a lot of good training videos available to you as well. Their support team, either email or phone call, just really friendly and walk you through the process. They have a nice outline of your ideal onboarding from just getting logged in and setting up your basic information to the real nitty gritty and deep details of some of the things that you need to do on there. And then also just helped us with the migration process from other point of sales to be able to get that data and that history integrated into Shop-Ware. They handle a lot of that for us and it helped a ton because that kept us from having a lot of manual data entry for them to be able to bring that into the software for us. So it's a really pretty seamless process, and then it works like you expect a system to work. So that makes it a lot easier for people to learn it and get comfortable with it very quickly. So I would just recommend to anybody who is considering Shop-Ware, certainly look around and compare to others, but the biggest thing is changing point of sale software is very, very difficult and time consuming sometimes. Shop-Ware makes that a lot easier, but you also want to make sure you pick the right one, because switching it ruffles feathers sometimes. Just people are used to a certain way. If you keep an open mind and really look at this from a now timeline to five years, 10 years down the road, I really think Shop-Ware is the best way to go, because they're just a lot more forward-thinking just with those new features that they're rolling out and just their mindset of making sure they understand how the shops operate. And they get so much feedback from owners, operators, advisors, technicians, and the owner herself actually owns her own automotive shop so she understands what you're going through on a daily basis and has done that. So that just makes the product that much better. Versus some of the others, they're a little bit out of touch sometimes whereas Shop-Ware is very, very feedback oriented to make sure that every change that they do is an improvement, not just a change. So definitely consider that when you're comparing Shop-Ware to those other platforms.