Founded in 1966, the Kunes Country Auto Group began in Delavan, Wisconsin, as a family-owned Ford Lincoln dealership. Today, they boast 23 locations in Wisconsin and Illinois, representing 14 domestic and imported brands.

The Challenge

The Kunes Service Departments were operated on an entirely paper-based process. All documents related to a service order were handled in hardcopy format throughout the service process, and then stored in filing cabinets or boxes for future reference. The Kunes team recognized several problems with this methodology:

• Their staff was spending an inordinate amount of time managing this paper-based process.
• Access to service records was limited to staff located near the records files.
• Paper records were taking up a significant amount of space at their dealerships.
• Easy retrieval of records was dependent upon accurate placement of those records in the files.
• Service records were not easily sharable within an individual dealership or across their network of dealerships.

The Solution

After evaluating a number of solutions for automating their service records, in 2015 the Kunes team selected DocuWare and engaged Stan’s LPS-Midwest to implement this solution.

Given the nature of their Service Department workflows and record-keeping needs, it was determined that DocuWare could be implemented on a “going forward” basis and that there was no need to scan historical
records into the system. This made implementation of DocuWare very straightforward and easy. The Stan’s and Kunes teams placed multifunction printers in each dealership that would be used to scan service documents. Stan’s DocuWare experts trained the Kunes Service Teams on DocuWare workflows and best practices. This included Service Advisors, Office Managers and General Managers. Heather Nichols, Regional Service Manager, was the point person for the transition to DocuWare. She states, “Implementation of the DocuWare system went very smoothly and the Kunes team enthusiastically embraced the change.”

The Outcome

Today, DocuWare is being used in all of the 23 Kunes dealerships. And as new dealerships are added to the group, DocuWare is usually implemented within one day and readily embraced by the staff.

Heather explains that Kunes has realized many benefits from the system including:

• Significant time savings over the prior paper-based system.
• Fast and reliable access to service records.
• The intuitive user interface of the DocuWare system.
• Reliable and secure, cloud-based record-keeping.
• The elimination of most filing cabinets and boxes. Kunes now only keeps paper files for one year after which they are destroyed.

The Kunes Team is very pleased with their decision to implement DocuWare from Stan’s. In fact, Heather looks back and wonders how they got along without it and looks forward to expanding the system into other areas of their business operations.