600 dealerships teach you a lot
2002: support for complex dealer management systems, a ten-person team and product ideas drawn from everyday dealership operations.
The year was 2002.
Supporting DRACAR+, AD2000 and OPTIMA21 meant much more than fixing technical faults. Parts, inventory, pricing, orders, CRM, ERP and manufacturer interfaces were all part of the same operational reality every day. Crystal Reports was used to create forms that were embedded in the respective systems.
Support as a window into real business processes
Depending on the area of responsibility, I supported around 600 dealerships across different manufacturers together with my team of around ten people.
The systems differed considerably: AD2000 ran on Unix and still looked much like DOS, while DRACAR+ and OPTIMA21 ran on Windows.
These industry ERP systems contained around 10,000 parameters and covered almost every area of a dealership, from new vehicle sales and parts and inventory to CRM connections and employee payroll.
The problems were therefore often more than technical: a price was wrong, an order went astray, a suggested order did not match actual demand, storage locations in the parts warehouse had disappeared, or an interface failed to deliver the expected result.
This gave me an early understanding of Business Applications that still guides me today:
Software can only be supported and improved effectively when you understand the real business process behind it.
From tickets to product improvements
Recurring problems were not simply documented. I worked with German support, the Product Owner in Germany and the development team in Denmark, formulated development requirements, reviewed specifications and supported new features through piloting.
Individual support cases increasingly became product work: recognising patterns, understanding causes and deriving requirements for better solutions.
From CDs by post to online distribution
ADP Dealer Services also had a data service department. It distributed monthly parts price master files from various automotive manufacturers to around 2,000 dealers in total.
The process was physical: several thousand CDs were created, burned and posted every month. Dealers then had to import the CD into their DMS and check whether the new pricing and master data had been imported correctly. For workshop or parts managers, this was not always straightforward.
I initially observed this process from my work in support and eventually developed a concept for distributing the price master files online.
Alongside this, I developed the idea of a paid managed service: current data would be imported automatically into the dealer installation. The person responsible would simply receive a notification that the monthly update had completed successfully.
Based on my project assessment at the time, the subsequent implementation reduced ongoing support effort from approximately two full-time positions to around 0.2 FTE.
Another concept explored a web-based DMS for independent workshops at a time when SaaS solutions were still far from commonplace in automotive.
I also designed a modern website for ADP Dealer Services during this period.
What stayed with me
This role strongly shaped my approach to products.
Good requirements rarely emerge from desk work alone. They emerge where many individual support cases suddenly reveal the same pattern.
Recognising those patterns, understanding the underlying business process and developing a better solution remain a common thread throughout my work.