[Seth Johnson]

It’s gonna be pretty hard to recover the “headcount” when people are making more money on the gov’t check than coming to work.

[Seth Johnson]

We have been using VAST for over 17 years. We are a multishop organization and it has a wonderful “backoffice”. It has a good storage system for customer records and Ad Hoc reporting features allowing you to create about any type of report you would like.

It supports flat rate or commission based pay, we use commission based. I have setup flat rate in the system but it is not currently in use.

We have it paired with Epicor’s Lasercat cataloging software. This allows us to custom define our catalog to match our available supplier by location. We can have a master catalog with several sub catalogs.

The have OpenWebs which makes parts ordering very easy. This works best with a 1st call supplier.

As far as tire functionality, this has been a struggle for us for sometime. We have been using our tire suppliers website to quote the tires and then bringing the parts back into VAST.

Last week we were introduced to some new functionality that shows quite a bit of promise. Tires can be quoted from within the system with photos of tread design and compared 3 at a time. You can set color coded markers to indicated tires that are on special, have a rebate etc – all user defined.

We are using RepairShopSolutions with Vast. Currently it does not have an integration feature but RSS uploaded the database for each location to the service so the majority of existing customers are in and ready to go. New customers are added easily as they arrive. I believe RSS is working on an integration as they have it with Mitchell, Napatrax and several others. We heard about the Autoserv1 inspection but have not seen it.

The biggest tell is that VAST was awarded the Goodyear contract. Goodyear liked what VAST was looking to to in the 7-10 years and they wanted that timeframe moved up. They are now in year 3 and on schedule. This is what prompted us to say if Goodyear gave a contract we must be missing something with our tire estimating.

Vast isn’t cheap, but its the whole package. Its kind of like scan tools…no one is going to everything but VAST comes close.