Two neighbouring dealership groups in the South East have pooled their resources to cut the cost of adopting a new DMS system.

Birchwood Ford and Kia, operating from five locations in Bexhill, Eastbourne, Halland and Hastings, and Dinnages, with Ford and Renault sites in Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill and Worthing, have both bought Pinewood’s Pinnacle DMS.

Pete Parker, operations director at Birchwood Ford, explained: “Because Pinnacle is charged on a pay-on-use basis, the largest cost of adopting the system is training. Thanks to the fact that Dinnages are geographically near to us and operate a similar business, we have been able to organise joint training sessions for all our staff and will split the cost accordingly.”

Adam Broyd, financial director at Dinnages, added: “We are very pleased to be adopting Pinnacle and believe that it will help us make key operational gains across our dealerships while, clearly, working with Birchwood on the training front to reduce the cost of adopting the DMS makes perfect sense. It’s a situation in which all the parties involved stand to benefit.”

Neville Briggs, managing director at Pinewood, said: “This is the first time we can ever remember having two dealer groups, which are effectively competitors, training together under one roof in this way but given the circumstances it makes sense for all parties.”

 Parker explained that Birchwood had decided to adopt Pinnacle for its Ford dealerships after positive experiences with the DMS at its Renault, Skoda and Suzuki locations.

He said: “We made a decision that we needed to adopt one DMS across the entire group and Pinnacle fitted the bill for an easy-to-use system that was regularly updated to suit changing market conditions, provided a high level of visibility across the business and added value to our dealerships.”