Meet the Proven, Leading Dealer and Rental Management Software Company: e-Emphasys Technologies

'A global IT Solutions Company dedicated to helping Equipment Dealers and Rental companies achieve profitable growth.’

e-Emphasys was founded in 1999, and began development of the eXtend ERP solution in 2003, with a single goal in mind: to provide dealerships of heavy equipment with the best possible Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution built specifically for their industry. Today, e-Emphasys has more than 250 employees globally, with headquarters in Cary, NC and regional offices in Japan, India and Netherlands. It is the vision on e-Emphasys to enlighten and embolden the entire heavy equipment dealership vertical with the possibilities of how a modern cutting-edge ERP platform, designed specifically for their industry, can transform their business.

Why Does the Heavy Equipment Dealership Industry Need e-Emphasys?
ERP in 2003 was not a new technology. However, most of the ERP solutions at that time, and still today, are built predominantly around a manufacturing-centric business model: the company makes a widget, and then the widget exits the factory never to be seen again. The business model for a heavy equipment dealer is much different – it involves considerable after-sales services and rental business.

This business model is the antithesis of discrete manufacturing, and so the goal of e-Emphasys was to build a leading ERP platform designed specifically around the needs of customers who have a large after-sales services or rental component to their business. In 2003, e-Emphasys decided to focus specifically on one vertical that exemplifies this business model, the heavy equipment dealership and rental space, and it has spent over 3,000 man-years of development over the past thirteen years building the eXtend ERP platform for this industry.

Many heavy equipment dealerships are family operated and multi-generational: grandfather started the dealership and taught his son who is now passing the reigns to the grandson. These businesses know their customers very well and are driven by these personal relationships. Their staff is loyal and experienced, many with 20, 30, or 40 years of experience in the industry. However, they also tend to be very conservative in their approach to running the business: the way they will run the business tomorrow, will be the way they ran it yesterday, because that is the way they ran it 30 years ago.

The traditional term for the software a dealership uses to run its business is a Dealer Management System (DMS). Over the past 30 years, many dealerships ended up choosing a Cobol-based solution as there were no other better options. By today’s standards, COBOL is an embryonic language and so Cobol-based DMS systems offer limited functionality. Even though COBOL was first invented in 1959, and has long since been replaced by superior technology, today over 80% of all heavy equipment dealers still use a legacy-based Cobol DMS to run their business.

The problem the dealership has faced over the years is two-fold: first, the limited functionality of a traditional DMS means the company must employ other software solutions as well or use excel spreadsheets creating islands of information. The problem is none of these systems are well integrated which costs the company in terms of time, double-entry, mistakes, redundancy, increased operational costs and high degrees of frustration within the staff. The second problem is that the limited functionality of a DMS has forced the company to modify their business practices, their procedures, the way they do business, to fit within the constraints of their technology. This is classic tail-wagging-the-dog and leads, again, to highly inefficient business practices and higher operational costs.

How Does eXtend ERP Solution meet these Industry Needs?
e-Emphasys has spent the last thirteen years dedicated to helping Heavy Equipment dealership deploy our state-of-the-art ERP. It focuses solely on creating Dealership and Rental excellence exclusively for the heavy equipment industry. What the company has learnt over the years is a tremendous amount of knowledge around the best practices and methods that a superior dealership should employ to run their business.

The first step is to share this knowledge and best practices, as a Trusted Business Advisor, with our customers. Many dealerships haven’t thought about how they run the business for years, they run it simply the way they always have. This might not be the most effective or efficient way. During e-Emphasys’ initial deployment engagement, the company sits down with senior leadership and functional heads and, with a proverbial clear piece of paper, we map out together not how they run the business today, but how it should be run. This is a combination of our repository of Industry best business practices and industry knowledge and any unique requirements of that particular dealership.

e-Emphasys captures these new processes and flows in its Business Process Modeler that is built into the eXtend platform and, together redesign how the business should run. Once these new best practices for this dealership have been determined, it implements and configures the company’s eXtend ERP solution to facilitate these flows.

Now everything is designed to maximize business efficiency and the technology employed, e-Emphasys’ eXtend ERP is the facilitator for this and not the raison d’être. This is truly the essence of Transformational ERP, which results in higher efficiency, profitability and most importantly increased customer satisfaction. eXtend ERP is the tangent where equipment services and information technology meet.

Meet the Master

Nicolas J. Orolin, President: Nicolas has served as President of e-Emphasys Technologies since joining the company in April 2016. Nick has spent 20 years building and leading enterprise software businesses around the globe, delivering growth, thought leadership, and innovation for diverse software and services companies including Alcatel-Lucent, Volt Information Sciences and MicroStrategy. Nick holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Wales, a Master’s degree in Management Studies from Oxford University, and conducted post-Master’s research at Cambridge University.

“Our mission is to enable forward-looking dealers to implement and execute their strategy for growth, improved profitability and Dealership excellence.”