Illustrating its true flexibility, ITK has been successfully implemented by Mazda Australia as its database/reporting tool for collecting and reporting its factory composite findings.

One of the keys to ITK as the winner of choice in securing this business was ITK's and CDS's combined ability to be flexible. The resulting process and output are a streamlined procedure that involves CDS handling all the receiving, importing and scrutinising of information as required by Mazda.

What follows next is the determination of the composite outcomes, based on the data submitted. Finally, monthly and quarterly Composite Reports are produced and delivered directly to the submitting dealership. The output determined in a joint process between key personnel at Mazda Australia, Grant Thornton and Complete Dealer Services. The key here is that there were no limitations as to what could be collected and then produced. The entire process was ultimately designed to meet the individual needs of Mazda Australia.

With the recent upgrade to ITKonline, Mazda Australia and it's dealers are awarded with instant feedback when it comes to their submissions. With the click of a few buttons, the results are delivered to ITKonline and the ability for both Franchise and dealer alike to review dealership performance. The interactive nature of ITKonline promotes exploration and revelation as a deeper understanding of the business is achieved.

The opportunities now are boundless for Mazda with its ability to peruse either summarical or detailed analysis of each submitting dealer.

Significantly, the changeover process for Mazda to ITK, from the original DOR reports, was uninterrupted. Like the Ford RJV process CDS undertook the receiving of all of the raw trial balances and mapped the accounts into ITK. This is a significant and distinct difference when compared to other reporting processes in the market place that place the onus on the dealer to map the data to a single format.

In performing this task CDS were able to ensure that the mapping was as per standard Mazda accounting. It was able to deal with the many issues that can often present themselves with things like "shared" used car yards (by two or more franchises) for example.

The outcome is that the Mazda Composite reports are now considered to be high on the scale of being the most accurate of the Composite reporting programs around. There is little opportunity to play with figures and the scope of the raw dealership accounts at the hands of the franchise.

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Secondly, we had to question and challenge all existing Isuzu reporting processes for appropriateness to Isuzu. When you consider that the old Isuzu reporting was handled as a couple of columns on the Holden DSA reports, it didn't take long to conclude that the whole Isuzu Chart of Accounts was due for a complete overhaul.

Thirdly, upon analysis of the Isuzu dealers we came to realise that the Isuzu camp is the most dis-similar collection of dealers you can imagine. Issues ranging from shared New and Used showrooms to multi product New showrooms to a mixture of Car and Truck facilities all reared their ugly heads.

It was clearly evident to us that due to the limiting nature of the previous chart, there were in fact very few practical implementations of the Isuzu chart actually adopted in the Dealership chart of accounts.

Rather than forcing all of these issues onto the dealerships CDS took on the awesome task of putting together an analytical mechanism that would make business sense to Isuzu. We created what we know to be a more "comparable" suite of reports than could otherwise be offered.

CDS recognised that many of the charts they presented to us reflected the practical implementations of Isuzu for that dealership. For example, a small rural dealer may have the Isuzu brand share a showroom and resources (salesmen etc) with other brands or, even used Trucks and Passenger vehicles.

Rather than forcing each dealership to speculate/deliver some kind of breakdown of expenses, CDS created "systems" that found automated ways to make the dissections on behalf of the dealers. So whether it is a comparison of units or sales or gross contributions, ITK was directed to calculate and apportion by the KPI appropriate to the situation (dealer by dealer). Then, to tackle the issue of dealing with the typically spasmodic nature of truck sales, where some months may actually involve no sales, we worked with a 13 month average of results to "normalise" the apportionment, guaranteeing a suitable dissection with an appropriate sample set.

It is fair to say that the resulting suite of Dealer results are more comparable and meaningful to the Isuzu dealers than might otherwise have been possible.