MITS Report Fuels Popular New RV Dealer Applications from Integrated Dealer Systems

MITS (r) and Integrated Dealer Systems (IDS) have joined forces to make it easier for RV dealers to grow their businesses, by integrating MITS Report(r) technology into IDS's flagship Astra Dealer Management System (DMS). The new CRM Reports(tm) application is available now from IDS .

IDS showed the new solution, which provides Web-based reporting capability to RV dealers wanting to analyze key customer relationship data, to an enthusiastic stream of RV dealers at the recent 2007 RVDA RV Dealers International Convention and Expo in Las Vegas. "The CRM application, with MITS Report embedded, was an enormous success," according to Sean Raynor, Director of sales and marketing at IDS . "Our booth overflowed throughout the week with customers who want to sign up to get on the installation schedule."

Raynor adds that leveraging the MITS Report technology shaved months off his product development cycle. "By not diverting software development resources from their core DMS expertise, we were able to focus on important CRM features for our customers. At the same time, we give users all the reporting capabilities they need - and then some. It was faster and more cost-effective to use MITS Report ."

The new CRM Reports application lets users interactively retrieve and analyze customer, sales, and operational information through pre-configured and user-created reports-any of which can be filtered, sorted, and totaled according to individual user needs, then exported to other formats or shared via email.

IDS chose the MITS technology because it met all of its reporting functionality requirements, due to its architectural fit, and in light of what Raynor calls "the strong MITS track record" in the reporting and business intelligence for MultiValue computing platforms. The Astra DMS runs on Microsoft Windows desktops, in independent client software and via Web browsers, which interact with remote, IBM Universe-based capabilities via a Microsoft .NET framework.

"When we designed MITS Report, we were thinking beyond the MultiValue market," explains MITS President Fred Owen , "so we made it easy to integrate into other applications on various platforms."

Like Owen, IDS ' Raynor believes software companies can and should leverage the expertise of other providers who specialize in "horizontal capabilities" like reporting. "They [MITS] have been doing this for more than ten years, and most software developers don't have their business intelligence and reporting expertise. Nor do they have much interest in pursuing it. It just makes sense to use technology like theirs."

Largely because of the positive experience with MITS Report, IDS also plans to offer MITS Discover-the company's business intelligence (analytics) solution-as an  add on product into its Astra DMS solution during the first half of 2008. IDS revealed an initial set of standardized hypercubes for MITS Discover at the RVDA show in September, each of which enable dealers to analyze, query, and drill down into a particular area of interest, and intend to refine and augment these cubes during the coming months.

For more details on MITS software solutions, contact a MITS representative at info@mits.com or visit the MITS Web site atwww.mits.com. For more  details on IDS Astra, visit www.ids-astra.com .