Case Study
MIX Industry APIs Help 3rd Party DSPs Scale
Motive Integrator eXchange (MIX) uses standardized Industry APIs to minimize DMS integration efforts, so you can focus on delivering greater value to your customers.
“Every DMS has its own API and specifications, and any time you’re connecting two systems, inevitably, things happen.”
ADAM RESNICK - PRESIDENT, MENUMETRIC
The Challenge
DMS Integration is a must for most third party auto tech companies. Yet building and maintaining Integrations to all the DMS necessary to reach the full market can deplete IT resources and introduce multiple points of failure – ultimately putting customer satisfaction at risk.
Implementing an integration well, comes down to the maturity of the integration platform and process,” says Senior Engineer of Traffic Control CRM, Daniel Strickland, who has worked with Motive Retail’s integration solutions for more than three years. “Each DMS API specification has unique caveats. With integrations prior to MIX, we’ve literally had to get on calls and go through a handheld process to determine how everything works.” With more than a dozen major DMS in the North American market, third party auto tech companies (3Ps) can’t afford to keep integrating to proprietary systems.
Everything starts with data from the DMS – a gold source ultimately for how well the dealership runs. Getting the data to flow and update in real time, accurately, is critical for the various business process flows across sales, service and back-end functions of the dealership. Time is money, and dealership staff don’t have time to enter deals or customer information in multiple systems. Integration is key.
From the Auto Tech Companies' Perspective
Focus on Growing Your Business and Let the Experts Handle Integration
“It’s nice to have a partner who specializes in integration. We can be experts at our thing, and anyone we can partner with that can help us deliver our value prop – that’s a great relationship.” -Adam Resnick.
Todd Phillips agrees. “Being able to bring many into one API connection has really simplified life for developers.”
“It’s remarkable that since we joined MIX, my dev staff, for the first time in several years, has had time to work on other internal projects.” David Jenurm, Traffic Control CRM
Better APIs, Simplified.
“Any time there is all sorts of car and dealership data, any API will have complexity to it,” recognizes Daniel Strickland, “But the direction that [MIX] has taken has certainly lowered the complexity significantly. JSON is so much easier. It’s lightweight and has a lot less reliance on a fixed (XML) format.”
MIX presents a common unified model that seeks to standardize the otherwise unique business objects defined by proprietary API definitions. Subscribing APIs write to one solution, and benefit from access to multiple, unique back-end systems.
“The common model cuts our development time by 66%.” reports Daniel. “If we onboard another DMS, we can essentially run on that code tomorrow.”
Todd Phillips points out that the common model has helped DDI identify where they were not getting information from previous APIs and has actually made data exchange more thorough.
Adam Resnick adds, “The API is written better, cleaner. It’s not just a bunch of code slapped on each time a new requirement arises.” Further, In production, “having a single point of contact is huge. I wish I had this solution years ago.”
Consolidating Integrations Helps 3Ps Scale, and Dealers Succeed.
“Being able to offer as many DMS as we can, and being able to consolidate DMS services into one simplified solution has helped us expand.” Said Todd Phillips of DDI Technology. He adds: “with MIX integrations, being able to seamless transfer dealers who switch DMS is no longer a problem.”
“As we look to expand into more industries, MIX’s standardized integration approach will help, with less effort on our side,” observes Buddy Rosenberg of Stone Eagle F&I.
By enabling more DMS integrations with a single API implementation, third parties can have more conversations with potential new customers without having to worry about which DMS the store uses now, or may switch to in the future.
