Arch Auto Parts, a member of the Automotive Parts Service Group (The Group), has been providing parts to repair shops and vehicle owners in the Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island area for more than 30 years.
How has the switch to a VoiP phone system helped you?
We used to have individual phone servers at each location. We invested in an Allworx VoiP server, which Windstream hosts for us. It lets us transfer and forward calls between our stores more easily. We're in a very diverse neighborhood, so depending on the customer's preference, they may have a specific counterman they like to deal with, and call their direct extension. That may be because they have specific expertise, or because they speak Spanish or French. It helps us develop those relationships with the customer.
How about the POS upgrade?
It's not something that customers would notice, but we have networked cash registers that allow us to pull activity and balance and reconcile sales more efficiently. The other thing we've done that is kind of cool is put in a cash management solution with Bank of America. Rather than bundling up deposits, we have smart safes that we just feed bills into, and it keeps track of how much there is and credits our accounts. It does the same thing with checks. We use high-speed scanners to automatically deposit them.
What was the biggest challenge in the technology upgrade?
The biggest challenge for us was the initial conversion with getting the monitoring set up. We have more failover capability than a typical configuration, and so when we first put it in, the company wasn't monitoring the individual lines, they were just monitoring whether they could reach the router or not. We could have two or three lines down, and they wouldn't know until we were completely out of business. It took some operational changes on the part of our service providers to monitor the lines instead of the router access.
What is your biggest business challenge right now?
Our biggest challenge from a business perspective is competing against the big retailers like AutoZone and Advance, because they have a lot of buying power. One of the big changes we made a year and a half ago was joining The Group. That gives us access to their combined purchasing power. That really is the hardest thing, competing against those large national chains and the buying power they have.
Subscribe to Aftermarket Business World and receive articles like this every month….absolutely free. Click here.
