A Message from our Founder & CEO: Carolyn Coquillette

Welcome 2023! This year marks Shop-Ware’s 10th anniversary, a proud milestone for the employees, customers, and partners who have made our success possible. I look forward to celebrating specific events in the company’s founding in the months to come.

Shop-Ware is uniquely positioned in the way we approach the market. You might say we’re ahead of our time, and in a way that’s true. It takes time for an industry to prepare for a major disruption and (one would hope) maximize its chances to survive. Shop-Ware is not here to reinvent the wheel: the age-old management processes baked into legacy shop software systems, reconstituted by our cloud competitors. My thanks to the competition for its mundane vision and allowing us such a sizable strategic advantage over the status quo.

Shop-Ware is best known (and cherished by our clients) for leading our industry where it needs to go, whether or not others agree to come along. Our solutions are innovative: courageous in their undertaking both to design and to deliver and unlike any other shop management software, legacy or new. Examples permeate the platform: DVX, Messenger, the Brain Box, Service Structure, the Notes Feed, Parts Allocations, Analytics, the Expeditor, the Optimizer, and more groundbreaking products coming your way in the next couple of months.

We pursue these innovations not because they are cool (though they are also that). We build them because service providers require them, to defend access to future repairs. The standard way of running a repair shop will not be viable in the near future (and for many, not even today). It’s too slow, disconnected, and dependent on manual processes (humans) to be cost effective. Self-driving cars do not make a phone call to book an appointment. Electric cars need too little routine maintenance to be dropped off in a parking space, separately driven into a service bay, and finally racked on a lift before any service value is delivered.

You need a better way to run your repair shop, and rest assured that there is a better way. That way will become the way cars are fixed. The only question is whether today’s existing shops will adopt that new way or a different service provider will.

The dates of mainstream EV adoption and self-driving sufficiency remain unknown, and that’s fortunate, because Shop-Ware still has much in store to position us for that inevitability. That said, Shop-Ware cannot survive without the support of other visionaries, those who also desire for the necessary tools to be in place when the time comes. That is why I founded this company ten years ago, to ensure we would have a corporate instrument to create and support the technology needed to run our businesses, for your repair shop and also my own. It didn’t exist at that time, and no one has challenged us to this day.

Thank you to everyone who continues to support our company’s mission: to our partners, to our integrators, and especially to our clients. Your dollars are an investment to ensure the future of your (and all of ours’) business.

Speaking of Mission…officially Shop-Ware’s is “to enable service providers to fix cars faster”, and we accomplish this (our Vision) “by reducing administrative work and inspiring consumer confidence using cloud-enabled technology for the best repair shops around the world.”

These statements are quite deliberate, and I will share more about their meaning in subsequent blogs this year.

Meanwhile, as a start-of-year kickoff, consider that fixing cars faster is the one critical component to ensure that we, the independent Automotive Aftermarket, are the ones fixing cars in the future. While today’s consumers will accept a loaner car, and muster the patience for a call back, self-driving cars will place a primary emphasis on out-of-service time. Speed of Service (or “Duration of Service“, for clarity) will be everything, so long as the car is properly fixed. Hence our Mission, to enable you to fix the car, first and foremost, and to also, always, help you fix it faster.

More tools to help you fix cars faster coming soon, and more to share on our company journey beginning 10 years (!) ago, in 2013.

Looking forward to a bright year ahead!