Lizzy CRM And Dealer Management System Update Coming 9/16/2012

Just a note that we’ll be releasing the latest version of Lizzy CRM and Dealership Management System Sunday the 16th.  There have been numerous updates but I wanted to cover one in detail that everyone needs to be aware of.

Current Version:  The current version of Lizzy was dealing with special order parts for the service department in a way that wasn’t very helpful.  When you would request a part from parts or would need a special order, the system wasn’t assigning any customer bin to the order and it was leaving it up to you what to do with it.  This was a huge problem for shops that were trying to get ahead of the game and order the items before the mechanics started to work on the units.

Another issue was between parts special orders and Internet orders.  All of the items were getting placed in a single large area to ship or hold which wasn’t really helping someone wanting to look at a wall and see how many customers hadn’t come to pickup their parts versus how many items just needed to be shipped out.

New Version:  There have been a lot of changes made to the customer bin section of Lizzy in this upcoming release.  The first of which (and is the most major) is that now when you pull items for service tickets, the system is going to pull a bin for you to put those parts in.  This means that instead of just figuring out on your own where to put the parts until the mechanic needs them, Lizzy will now hold them for you.  This also means that when you get ready to deliver the parts to the mechanic, you need to do so through the delivery screen located in the service menu.  This works the same as giving customers their parts when they special order things so shouldn’t take too much to figure out.

For those of you that were using the “Request Parts” button on the invoice, this button is now intelligent and only shows “IF” parts need to be requested.  Once you have requested the parts the button will disappear which now lets you know that you have requested the parts already.

If you change the quantity on a requested part that effects the parts department there are one of two scenarios that will play out.  If you reduce the quantity before parts has gotten to your original request it will just reduce the quantity on their screen and nothing else needs to be done.  If you reduce the quantity after they have pulled the parts then you will be forced to deliver the full amount to your invoice and then reduce the quantity from there.  The reasoning for this is that reducing it while the parts are still in the bin are going to get really messy for the parts department to try to keep straight.

Another change is the use of the returns bin to place parts.  If you are using the returns bin to place parts in order to put them back into stock, then the system will also put service parts there as well.  This eliminates the parts people from having to immediately go put things back up.  The service person changes a quantity, puts the part physically in the returns bin and the parts department gets it back into inventory when they get time.

Next, we’ve already written into the code the ability to have more than one bin type.  We have not added the control yet to settings to allow you to create the extra bins and that will be done some time next week.  We wanted to let the dust settle on this upcoming release due to the massive amount of changes we made to make sure we don’t have any issues, but the new bin types will be “Parts, Service, Internet/Catalog” that you’ll be able to create.  This will allow you to store parts in different areas of the dealership so that you can more easily (visually) see what is going on.  Again, this particular ability won’t show up for another week or two.

We’ve also cleaned up Lizzy’s CRM system a bit and made it a bit easier to see what is what.  We also moved the contact type control that use to be below the address information, over to the right of the main contact detail to make it easier to see and work with.  We also renamed the “Office Hours” field to just read “Available Hours” because people were getting confused with what it was to be used for.

Again, there are numerous updates headed your way this weekend but wanted to make you aware of a few of the more important ones.