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Top 6 Auto Repair Shop Management Systems

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Every day repair shops, body shops, collision centers and oil change stations have to deal with a huge number of customers, auto parts, and employees.

In the current environment of high competition every organization has to keep careful records for each of the above factors to ensure stable work of the company and proper customer care.

Running an effective auto shop is the way to make maximum profit each day and to build relationships with customers. Thats why many of todays auto shop owners have automated their business processes which helps not only to save labor time, hold control of the business effectiveness of the shop but also business automation is a real opportunity to improve customer service and to increase at the same time customer return rate.

After having looked into the work processes of auto shop business the top software products available on the market were determined, here are the 7 best, in no specific order.

All Data
ALLDATA Manage On-line was developed to provide shop owners with tools to run their business effectively. Make your shop more profitable and manage your customers experience with these key features:
-Track customer histories,
-Look up the complete 17-digit VIN from a license plate using Quick-VIN
– On-line Parts Ordering
– Easily track and assign jobs to technicians and bays
– Print or email with parts and labor organized estimates.

AutoRepair Cloud
AutoRepair Cloud is a cloud based all-in-one platform for running your auto shop business. It gives small and midsize businesses complete control over their auto shop business processes within an easy-to-use software solution. It helps to manage your customers, inventory, and keep track of your annual/monthly budget.
Run your business like a fine tuned machine. Manage repair orders, workflow tracking, inspections and invoicing with ease. Tech can see all important data arranged in one place, and achieve order without any effort.
Key features:
-Easy vehicle/customer management
-Appointment scheduling
-Inspection reports, estimates and invoices
-VIN code scanner/decoder
-Mobile application to shares workflow with the customer

MaxxTraxx
The MaxxTraxx Editions are designed to fit your needs be that a 12 Bay three million dollar a year shop, or a fresh new owner / operator just getting your start. Read on to see what Edition fits your needs today; and know there is an Edition for your tomorrow no matter how big you want to become.
Key features:
-Repair order history, vehicle/ customer tracking
-Appointment schedule
-Electronic auto parts ordering, inventory management
-Integrated marketing tools (letters, post cards, reminders)

Mitchell1
Mitchell 1 began in 1918 with the simple idea that people needed information to fix cars. For over 90 years, Mitchell 1 has been a leader in providing information solutions that simplify everyday tasks for automotive professionals helping make their jobs easier. Over the years, Mitchell 1s products have evolved to keep pace with industry and technological advances.
Key features:
– Billing & Invoicing
– Customer Database, vehicle tracking, service history, work order management
– Inventory Control, Parts Management
– Labor Rates, Quotes / Estimates
– Maintenance Scheduling
– VIN Decoder

AutoFluent
AutoFluent is powerful automotive business management software that gives you the user-friendly tools you need to run more cost-effectively.
Whether your focus is in auto servicing, tire sales, parts sales, or any combination of these, AutoFluent is designed to help you improve how you track and manage your customers, employees, sales, inventory and suppliers.
Key features:
-Review and search customer and vehicle information by phone , address, vehicle, invoice number of
-Customized invoices
-Email marketing automation
-Comprehensive sales reporting for profit, commission, productivity, and more
-Bar/VIN code scanning, use CARFAX data to load vehicle data with a license plate or VIN, view vehicle service history
-Labor guides from AllData, Mitchell1, Real Time Labor Guide and Motor

FastTrak
Since 2001, FastTrak has been designing software that increases profits and cuts costs, helping auto repair shops, tire stores and fleet service companies become more productive and profitable.
FastTrak is scalable from one to hundreds of users, single to multiple locations, and is modular. You only pay for what you need. Its also one of the few in the industry with a wireless handheld device that allows you to take orders from the car and update your FastTrak database in real time.
– Accurate inventory control
– Labor and time guide
– Email estimates, invoices and bulk emails to your customer base for more sales and customer retention
– Allows repair orders to be assigned and prioritized using a simple drag and drop interface

Business Training Opportunities

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Career training opportunities can take many forms and can often be used as continuing education credits that will help them keep specific certifications. Members of management often encourage employees to improve their skills by attending classes whenever they are available. It is understood that keeping up with new forms of technology is the best way to keep a company one step ahead of its competitors.

1)College Courses IT professionals and individuals who work with software on a daily basis, might do well to take college courses that teach the newest trends, and as such many colleges and universities offer professional development IT training. Accounting professionals can also benefit from refresher courses every couple of years to stay on top of new tax laws and guidelines, making this a career path that requires lifelong accounting training. Individuals can also work towards a higher degree in the hopes of advancing their career.

2)Company Sponsored Training Programs Large corporations who want to provide learning opportunities for their employees may hire instructors to come in and give lectures. Industry leaders can offer advice on new techniques and practices that can help increase the efficiency of the business. By holding company sponsored training programs, management can make sure every employee receives the same training, without having to rely on them to complete it outside of work.

3)Specialized Training Programs Suppliers and equipment manufacturers may provide training to individuals who will be operating or using their product in the workplace. One example is an accountant who will be using a new version of software for accounts payable/receivable. This type of accounting training is beneficial because the individuals teaching the course are those who developed the software.

4)Webinars Online seminars or webinars can keep members of management up to speed on the latest trends in office management and business procedures. They can be completed in their office or at home simply by logging into the training website. While most webinars cannot be used for continuing education credit, they can provide sound advice for individuals who are dedicated enough to sit through them and take notes.

5)Online Classes and Conferences Online classes and conferences are also beneficial forms of business training. Many people do not have time in their already busy schedules to sit in a classroom for several hours a week at a specific time. Online classes allow them to do their work at their own convenience and gain college credit at the same time. College courses follow the same format as conventional college classes except students are able to work from home. Most online classes will transfer to regular classroom credits if the student chooses to return to a more traditional college setting.

A Guide On Managing Hotels Kpi

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KPI management is as important as implementation process of Balanced Scorecard. Sure thing, the choice of the right key performance indicators and development of the right strategy is vital for BSC success. At the same time maintenance of Balanced Scorecard and management of key performance indicators is a critical success factor for efficient use of Balanced Scorecard. By the way, improper management of key performance indicators is one of the most common mistakes in implementation and maintenance of Balanced Scorecard. Just having a set of key performance indicators is not enough. It is necessary to adequately measure them, exchange obtained information between different managerial levels, as well as use evaluation results in decision making and strategy revision. This also concerns hotel Balanced Scorecard. Hotel industry is known as being extremely competitive. Indeed, there is no lack of options when looking for the hotel to spend the night there or the entire vacations. Hotels are eager to use
Balanced Scorecard since this system can certainly help transform strategic plans into real actions. This is only possible if all rules and norms of Balanced Scorecard maintenance and KPIs management are observed.

As known, Balanced Scorecard consists of four categories: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. What makes Balanced Scorecard unique? Unlike similar performance evaluation systems of Balanced Scorecard evaluates nonfinancial indicators as well. In terms of a hotel industry these indicators refer to customer satisfaction, improvement of hotel personnel professional level, optimization of internal processes, for example laundry, dining services, housekeeping and cleaning, reception services etc.

No less imagine such a situation hotel top managers have developed a strategy and selected a set of key performance indicators that fall into the above mentioned four categories. Now is the time to start using Balanced Scorecard and evaluate the selected KPIs. It needs mentioning that key performance indicators should be measurable and understood. As time passes by the first results are obtained. This is perhaps the most important stage since top managers have to find out whether are not they have made the right choice and assigned the right weights for indicators. For instance, such a key performance indicator as room occupancy may not matter much as visitors tend to stay for more than three days in a hotel and maintenance of vacant rooms requires little expenses. This is just a hypothetical example.

Having obtained the first results, top management needs to analyze them. KPI evaluation results show progress or regress of a hotel on its way to implement strategic goals. Thus, hotel managers and owners locate problematic areas and make decisions as to necessary improvements. For instance, if your kitchen performance prevents hotel from optimize an overall performance, relevant decisions need to be made (e.g. hiring new chef, changing food supplier etc.). Balanced Scorecard will work only in case the information it provides is actually used to initiate changes. Balanced Scorecard will not change the situation by itself but rather offer important and valuable information for top managers and business owners.

How stealing Yale’s Investment Strategy Can Make You Rich

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When I spoke with Jack Meyer, the former head of Harvard University’s endowment, at the offices of Goldman Sachs on Fleet Street in London back in 2009, he was thoroughly chastened by the recent 25%+ drop in the value of Harvard’s endowment. A month or two later, Stanford University’s President John Hennessy, reflecting his Silicon Valley roots, was more optimistic about Stanford’s similar collapse, telling me: “Look, Nick, it’s not the end of the world. It just puts us back to where we were in 2006.” Hennessy’s optimism notwithstanding, the crash of 2008 turned much of the global financial world on its head. This included much-vaunted “Yale model” that had made Harvard and Stanford tens of billions of extra dollars over the past two decades.

Despite the challenges of the market meltdown of 2008, the “Yale model” remains one of the most powerful investment strategies around. And thanks to exchange-traded funds (ETFs), today you can duplicate this investment strategy in your own personal investment portfolio. It is also an investment approach I have implemented with impressive success through the “Ivy Plus” Investment Program for my clients at my investment firm Global Guru Capital.

For a period of more than 20 years, the investment strategies of top university endowments seemed blessed by fairy dust. The top three U.S. university endowments — Harvard, Yale and Stanford — consistently had returned more than 15% per year over the last decade. And even after the onset of the credit crunch in the summer of 2007, the Harvard endowment gained 8.6%, Stanford rose 6.2% and Yale climbed 4.5% through June 30, 2008. That compared with a drop of 15% in the S&P 500 over the same time period.

That all changed once the financial crisis hit in full force in 2008, and the top university endowments plummeted by 25%-30%. The joint losses for Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton hit $23 billion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2009.

Maybe those Ivy League types weren’t so smart after all…

Since the dark days of 2008, top university endowments have staged a comeback. Primed by savvy investments in technology, Stanford’s endowment rose 14.4% in the year ended June 30, 2010, outshining returns at Harvard and Yale, which gained 11% and 8.9%, respectively.

Yale’s David Swensen: The “Babe Ruth of Investing”

You can trace the long-term investment success of top university endowments directly back to the efforts of a single man, Yale’s David Swensen.

As the Yale endowment’s chief investment officer for two decades, David Swensen has earned a reputation as the “Babe Ruth” of the endowment investment world

After taking over the Yale endowment in the mid 1980s, Swensen boasted 15.6% average annual returns through 2007 and no down years going back to 1987.

So, how did Swensen’s success single-handedly change the rules of institutional investing?

In 1985, around the time Swensen took over, Yale had more than 80% of its endowment invested in domestic stocks and bonds. But Swensen, an economics PhD, observed that no asset allocation model ever actually recommended that way. As long as their correlation with U.S. stocks and bonds was low, adding unconventional assets to your portfolio would both reduce your risk and increase your return. This led Yale to emphasize private equity and venture capital, real estate, hedge funds that offer long/short or absolute return strategies, raw materials, and even more esoteric investments like storage tanks, timber forests and farmland.

Until the fall of 2008, this approach worked almost like magic…

The “Yale Model”: Still the Best over the Long Run

But the relatively poor performance of the Yale endowment during the crash of 2008 put Swensen on the defensive. Critics pointed out that during the meltdown, a traditional portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds would have lost only 13% of its value, rather than the 25% or more lost by the diversified portfolios of Harvard, Yale and Stanford.

But as Yale’s President Richard Levin pointed out in Newsweek magazine, that argument is astonishingly shortsighted. Over the past 10 years, including the crash, Yale’s endowment managed average annual returns of 11.7% to reach its current value of $16 billion. A 60/40 portfolio over the same period would have earned 2.1%, producing an endowment of only $4.4 billion. Put another way, Swensen’s strategy had earned Yale an extra $11.6 billion over 10 years. That indirectly made Swensen one of the world’s largest philanthropists, on par with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

Throughout the crisis, Swensen remained adamant that the model was viable over the long run. He pointed out that the single worst thing that you can do is to avoid risky assets after a market crash. He knew that Yale had suffered from poor decisions on asset allocations in its past — one that had put Harvard-level wealth out of its reach forever.

You see, at the time of the market crash in 1929, the endowments of Harvard and Yale were roughly the same size. But Yale’s trustees got spooked and invested heavily into “safe” bonds for the next five decades, while Harvard tilted more toward stocks. The result? Over the next 50 years, in relative terms, Yale’s endowment shrunk to half the size of Harvard’s.

Since the crash of 2008, Harvard has implemented the lessons of 1929 well. Leaving its critics aghast, Harvard actually has increased its allocation to high-risk positions in alternatives, at the expense of its “safe,” fixed-income allocation.

Yes, You Can Replicate Harvard’s Success…

In 2005, Swensen published a book, “Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment,” which explains how you can apply Yale’s investment approach to your own portfolio. Swensen argues that Yale’s investment strategy is tough for you to duplicate. After all, Yale has 20 to 25 investment professionals (Harvard at one time had as many as 200) who devote their careers to looking for investment opportunities. Yale also has the deck stacked in its favor. Its sterling reputation allows it to invest in the very best private equity and hedge funds — asset classes that are not readily available to retail investors. As Mohamed El-Arien, a former head of the Harvard endowment put it, attempting to duplicate Harvard’s results “would be like telling my son to drop out of school and play basketball with the goal of becoming the next Michael Jordan.”

Of course, highly paid investment managers like El-Arien have every reason in the world to overstate the impact of their “skill.” But this does not dilute Swensen’s basic message: to focus on the “big-picture” asset allocation decisions and move your money out of U.S. stocks and bonds into global and other asset classes. Swensen himself recommends that you model Yale’s asset allocation through a portfolio consisting exclusively of index funds with low fees.

At my firm, Global Guru Capital, I have run an “Ivy Plus” Investment Program that replicates the investment strategy of the top university endowments using Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) for the past two years. So far, it has behaved exactly as advertised. In the 12 months between June 30, 2009 and June 30, 2010- dates for which Havard has released performance data – the performence of the fully invested “Ivy Plus” investment program has matched the Harvard endowment almost exactly.

Of course, two years isn’t a long time. But the “Ivy Plus” strategy has outperformed some of the top hedge funds in the world during some of the toughest times ever in financial markets, by sticking to a disciplined, highly diversified asset allocation strategy.

My biggest challenge? The “Ivy Plus” investment program is a hard strategy to “sell” to my potential clients. It just seems too unexciting and straightforward to believe…

The bottom line? You may not have access to the Michael Jordans of the investment world. But diversifying out of a standard U.S. stock and bond portfolio into asset classes like commodities, real estate, and global stocks and bonds can go a long way toward generating Harvard-style returns.

Maybe those guys and gals at Harvard, Yale and Stanford aren’t so dumb, after all…

Experiencing the BlackBerry PlayBook Innovation

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BlackBerry PlayBook entered the market just a few months ago, and people are already clamoring to become the owner of one. The BlackBerry PlayBook is a seven-inch, 1024×600 WSVGA LCD touch screen on a 130mm x 194mm x 10mm tablet that is designed for portability and usability. Unlike the smartphones usually produced under the same brand name, BlackBerry PlayBook runs on the new BlackBerry Tablet OS. The new OS is founded on the QNX Neutrino real-time operating system, which was designed to run ADOBE AIR as well as BlackBerry WebWorks applications. BlackBerry prides itself on being able to produce a lighter and more portable tablet than its competitors while still not sacrificing any of the applications needed for better performance.

Some of the BlackBerry PlayBook features include a 1 GHz dual core processor which pairs up with the product’s multi-touch display and ability for multitasking. This means that users can perform multiple demanding tasks without compromising speed. Included in the perk’s list is a 3 MP front-facing camera which can be used for video conferences over Wi-Fi. It also features a 5 MP rear-facing camera which is capable of supporting up to 1080p film playback.

But features are only a small part of the package. On the other hand, the PlayBook also has as many as three thousand additional applications from BlackBerry App World present during the initial BlackBerry PlayBook launching. Unlike BlackBerry smartphones, however, BlackBerry PlayBook apps do not include the characteristic mail, contacts and calendar applications. As of now, the only way to be able to access these on your PlayBook is to utilize the BlackBerry Bridge to facilitate pairing between the PlayBook and your BlackBerry smartphone. This can become quite a downside for non-BlackBerry smartphone users.

Many reviewers and comments about BlackBerry came out after the initial release. Some were quite positive in their assessments while others seemed bent on nothing but negative analysis. The main argument seems to be on the fact that the producer company decided to remove the mail, contacts and calendar applications from the PlayBook itself. Although as stated earlier, one can still access them through BlackBerry Bridge. In response to these reviews from their customers, the company has made plans to make these apps available on the next software update on the PlayBook. Other BlackBerry PlayBook software updates to look forward to include the addition of BlackBerry Java and Android-based applications in BlackBerry App World.