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AutoQuotes July 2010 Newsletter

 
Hope youre all enjoying the summer.  Its certainly been a hot one for most of us.   At AutoQuotes, were spending time (in the air conditioning) analyzing the events and experiences of the spring and planning the fall/winter schedule.  Suggestions and ideas culled from the various trainings, meetings, and events that we attend are documented, extensively explored, and assigned to the program development team for R&D.   Not all suggestions make it into the program but many do and we really appreciate when you take the time to send us your thoughts.  Any reported program bugs are likewise assigned to the development team for immediate resolution. 

The addition of the AQ360 discussion group on our forum ( http://discussion.aqnet.com/forum ) has only strengthened the communication among the AutoQuotes community, supporting a healthy, daily exchange, which has been significant in the shaping of AutoQuotes 360.   622 companies are now using AQ360.  Thats 25% of the companies using AutoQuotes, including 16% of all individual AutoQuotes licensees.  The count of AutoQuotes 360 users grows every day.  Give it a try at  www.aq360.com .

Please continue to reach out to us with your ideas.  Check out the discussion group (noted above), email our Tech Support department (techtalk@aqnet.com ) or email me directly (mgreenwald@aqnet.com ) and share your ideas.  We take them very seriously. The only bad idea is to keep your ideas to yourself.

Coming soon to a city near you

With MAFSI, our education partner, we are pleased to announce the fall 2010 AutoQuotes 360 training schedule:
    Columbus, OH September 29
    Toronto, Ontario October 5
    Los Angeles, CA October 12
    Denver, CO October 19
    Miami, FL November 3

Registration is now available online at http://www.mafsi.org.   We look forward to seeing you on the road this fall!   Keep cool.
 


Michael Greenwald, President, AutoQuotes

Carlisle expands their AutoQuotes categories

On Monday July 26,2010, Carlisle FoodService Products is making a change to their categories in AutoQuotes to better match their customers category groups and eliminate confusion on pricing/quoting.

This change will require all AutoQuotes administrators to update their Carlisle entry accordingly in the Manufacturer Setup section of the program.  

AutoQuotes

The response to AutoQuotes new web-based version, AQ360 has been outstanding.  This new technology provided by AutoQuotes and its two principals Michael Greenwald and Kent Motes is a tremendous asset for the industry. As a membership benefit, FEDA members have exclusive features within AQNet that are not available to non-FEDA members. They are as follows:

• FEDA members can export AutoQuotes Product Data (total of 400,000 Products) and use this data to update inventory prices or company web catalogs. The export includes Model Numbers, Specifications, List Prices, physical data (weights, dimensions), Pack sizes and Brand Names.
• FEDA members can also export the entire database of Color Pictures. There are single shots and group shots for 321,000 Products, a great addition for web catalogs and point of sale systems.

FEDA supports AutoQuotes and deems this to be an important technological advance for the dealer community and the industry as a whole.  Our March/April issue of News & Views will be focused on All-Things AutoQuotes.

AutoQuotes February 2010 Newsletter

Spotlight on AutoQuotes 360………..Utilities

Well, we took a baby step towards this in AQNet, but in AutoQuotes 360 we’ve truly been able to take this to the next level.  In AQNet, we created a utilities grid that you could fill in.  We even gave you some dropdown choices for voltage, phase, and NEMA plug configurations….. But the bottom line was that you had to complete the utility grids yourselves.  Well……not anymore.

We invested a ton of time over the past two years fielding all of the utility data so that the utility grids (electrical & plumbing) can self-populate for standard buyout items.  The dropdown choices will still be there and you can still type in the empty grids for fabricated items or other items not taken from the AutoQuotes database.   Most electrical & plumbing rough-in information will auto-populate the utility grids in AutoQuotes 360.  These values will, of course, reflect the specification choices that you make along the way (voltage, gas, water connections, etc).


 
This utility information can be exported into Excel which will allow you to quickly & easily disseminate this information into the field.  By extension, these utility loads and connection sizes will self-populate the utility grids on spec book lead sheets, which will save countless hours transcribing that information manually.

 
Try it out & let us know what you think.  


Michael Greenwald


Aren’t we already sustainable?  Or is there still more we can do?

Earlier this month our management team attended NAFEM’s annual meeting and management workshop at the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa in beautiful Sonoma, CA.  (Kudos to the NAFEM staff and Terry Hoelle from Structural Concepts for a fantastic event and an amazing weekend!)  While the workshop touched on several topics, the overriding themes that emerged were sustainability and using social networking as a marketing tool.  Since there really isn’t enough space in this newsletter to expand on both of these concepts, I’m going to address sustainability this month and using social networking as a marketing tool next month.

Before moving on, it might be helpful to define sustainability, especially since the word itself seems to provoke a knee-jerk reaction and incite political rhetoric as soon as it’s mentioned.  While dictionaries provide more than ten meanings for the word sustain, the main ones being to maintain, support, or endure, a universally-accepted definition of sustainability is elusive because it is expected to achieve many things.  In the context of this article, I’m defining sustainability and ways of living more sustainably as “the responsible use of natural resources” and “adjustments in individual lifestyles that conserve n atural resources,” respectively.

Okay, so back to the meeting and management workshop…we’re in a room full of the best and brightest of the industry (not quite sure why they invited me) and the speakers are pontificating about how unsustainable we as a society have been and continue to be, how attitudes are changing with regards to sustainability and companies that aren’t sustainable, and what it means for all of us moving forward.  And, as my mind began to digest what each speaker was espousing, I began to draw parallels between their messages and the satirical rebuttal to our parent’s account of how things used to be when they were growing up.  For those of you who haven’t heard it, and for those of you that have, I have taken the liberty of including some of it below, if only to set the stage for the underlying points of this article. ( Click here for the full text)
“When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda!
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!   

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.  You've got it so easy!  I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia!  And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet.  If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves...in the card catalog!!   

There was no email!!  We had to actually write somebody a letter...with a pen!   Then we had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox...and it would take like a week to get there!   
There were no CD players or MP3 players or i-Pods! We had tape decks in our car..  We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby!  Dig?
See!  That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten!  You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd”   
 
And, to bring it closer to home… (my apologies to the original author for the omissions and this addition)
“And for those of you that weren’t in the industry before 1990…AutoQuotes didn’t exist!  If you wanted to do a quote, you had to use the manufacturer’s paper catalogs and price lists (if they were even up to date), a calculator for each item to work out your pricing, and write all of it out…by hand…on a piece of paper!  
Need a spec sheet quickly?  Forget about it!  Nine times out of ten, one of your co-workers had pulled it from the book, made a copy of it, and either misfiled it when they put it back or forgot to put it back altogether…meaning you had to call the factory and wait for them to fax it to you.”

To further underscore how AutoQuotes has changed the face of our industry:  99% of AutoQuotes users cite AutoQuotes as their primary source of product information and a majority of them have even eliminated printed catalogs and price lists from their offices entirely.  Many of our manufacturer partners have told us that having their product information available in AutoQuotes has allowed them to drastically reduce their print and postage costs (because they’re printing and shipping less catalogs and price lists).

Which brings me to the first point of this article; by drastically reducing the need for printed catalogs and price lists, AutoQuotes is already making your business more sustainable.    
And while reducing the need for printed catalogs and price lists is certainly commendable, I’m convinced that there is still more that “we” (the collective we) can do (i.e., the second point of this article).  Here are a couple of ideas to chew on:
•    Manufacturers, instead of just reducing the amount of printed price lists and catalogs, why not eliminate them altogether?  With your products in AutoQuotes and your complete catalog and price list in PDF format on your website, is there really a need to print catalogs and price lists?
•    For anyone who has a website with product information (Dealers, Reps, and Manufacturers), does it really make sense to store the product information (pictures, spec sheets, manuals, etc.) that displays on your website on both your web server and on the AutoQuotes servers?  By storing the product information on the server that runs your website, you increase the amount of space your website needs to take up, which translates into a bigger server and more power (i.e., energy) to run that server.  Since AutoQuotes is the most comprehensive product database in the entire industry AND that database is now online, wouldn’t it make more sense to use the product information in the AutoQuotes database to ‘power’ the product section of your website?  Doing so would allow you to reduce the size of your own server and ensure that you always have the most up-to-date product information on your website.

I realize that the above ideas might seem outlandish to some of you and even downright heretical to others.  But, to echo the theme from the workshop; times and attitudes are changing and we need to change with them.  As the ideas above are either already available or in development here at AutoQuotes HQ, we’d like to think that we’re doing our little piece in helping lead the industry to sustainability.  

We’d also like to hear what your thoughts, comments, and suggestions on the topic of this article.  Feel free to post a comment below or email me directly at  dgreene@aqnet.com.

Turning to AutoQuotes training….

We’re back on the road again this spring with training on AutoQuotes 360, the newest and most feature-rich version of AutoQuotes yet! (See Michael’s article for a feature exclusive to AutoQuotes 360).

The dates and locations for AutoQuotes 360 training are listed below.  
•    March 31 -  Dallas, TX
•    April 20 -  Phoenix, AZ
•    May 4 -  Baltimore, MD
•    May 11 -  New York, NY
•    May 21 -  Chicago, IL

For details and registration information, please visit AutoQuotes training information

Thanks for reading our newsletter, for sharing your comments, and for your continued support!  We hope to see you at an upcoming AutoQuotes training seminar!
 

David Greene

For more information about AutoQuotes and AQNet please visit the following links:

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