"The End of the Day with Ray!" podcast interviews ECI's Anna Grubb

At the recent Toshiba Lead Beyond event in Las Vegas, our very own Anna Grubb, global VP of sales for our Field Service division, sat down with Ray Stasieczko from the “End of the Day with Ray!” podcast to talk a bit about the industry and cloud solutions.

Here are some of the highlights of their chat:

Ray Stasieczko (RS): A lot of times, people look at ECI and are saying to themselves, “Well, that’s great if you’re a big dealership, but we’re just a million-dollar dealership in some little rural town in America.” So why would we want to buy an ECI product?

Anna Grubb (AG): ECI, as a whole caters to the SMB and the entrepreneurial spirit, making sure that we're tailoring for all of their needs. It is also a misconception that we're only for larger dealers. We have current customers that have as little as one user on e-automate. Now that we are in the cloud, you just pay a price per user per month and we get you set up with everything you can possibly imagine.

RS: I want to focus on the cloud platform. Here at the Lead Beyond Toshiba meeting, there’s a lot of talk about cloud and cloud services. Obviously, ECI has been migrating their customers from those old days of SQL servers in the closet and all that nonsense. So, how is that migration going? and tell us a little bit about that cloud platform.

AG: There is this preconceived notion that e-automate is an on-prem solution and that's because that's how we originally sold it, but the little-known fact is over 60% of our dealers are actually already on our cloud solution. We bring them to our Saas-based offering, and they have everything they need. We keep their system up and running for them without downtime. When there's a new version released, we get that going for them, and they have no concerns. There's nothing that they have to do at all.”

RS: In the old days, you gotta go out there and buy some SQL servers and invest all this money, and then you gotta migrate stuff and all this crazy work. And then you have to buy the license for the enterprise. So now [with cloud] if I’m a dealer with 10 users, I would simply pay for 10 licenses through the cloud? Is there any kind of contract on that?

AG: Yes, there is a SaaS-based contract that you'd sign with us just to ensure that you know your data is safe and secure. Then it's really easy to get you set up in no time.

RS: What is the pain for a dealer to switch to an ERP? What does that involve?

AG: Well, it depends on where they're going because they must get the data there. Can you migrate the data in the format you need to keep your business running? It could take anywhere from three to five months or more, and then you have to ensure everything you need is working the way you want it to.

You know as well as I do that e-automate is well known in this industry for the way that we handle the dealers, contract profitability, and giving visibility. So, we don't find many dealers who actually want to leave us, which is a great situation. We try really hard to ensure that our dealers know we are listening to them.

RS: So, let’s talk a little bit about Printanista. Your goal with that was to take your other DCA tools acquired over the years and put it all into one platform. So how is that going now with getting the dealers to migrate to the new platform?

AG: We currently have four device management tools. The one I came from which was PrintFleet, FM Audit, Print Audit, and Printanista. After we launched Printanista, we had to get migration tools. We want to make sure that we keep our customers happy so we have been working on how we migrate them over. It’s almost two years since Printanista was launched, since then hundreds of dealers [have migrated] to Printanista.

A benefit of getting there is your further integration. If you really want to streamline your business and make sure everything is truly automated—no pun intended—coupling Printanista with e-automate is really going to be game-changing for your business and make things so much easier.

RS: All I gotta say is it has a great history and proven track record. You guys are doing some great things in the marketplace.

Check out "The End of the Day with Ray!" YouTube channel for more insight and interviews with Ray.