ID837 - Plan B

Plan B is a follow up to (the unsuccessful) ID955 - Crowd funded purchase of eAutomate. Private Equity firms view the Office Technology industry as a saturated market, ECI has almost 100% of this market and there is little incentive to invest. The focus from the PE owners of eAuto is on raising prices and reducing support. The areas where this is not happening are the add on products. There are now lots of choices for DCAs which is forcing ECI to make Printanista better and to offer better rates. eTMS has done a great job of competing with Remote Tech/ Mobile Tech. Our Online Payments allows other Payment Processors to compete with Net1, who are now reducing their rates. The industry needs choices, whether DCAs or CRMs or PSAs, new cool products are coming to market all the time and dealers need to be able to easily change.

 

If there are viable alternatives to eAuto as the ERP for the Office Technology space, then ECI will be forced to be competitive. You could move to an incomplete platform like Forza, then move back to eAuto when you realize the promised features are not coming, as many Forza dealers did. Or try Plan B.

 

Juice is looking to give you choices for an ERP. We think that Dynamics ERP may be the best choice today, given the success of O365. But DXOne has been out there for a while and Noetics is a newcomer. In our opinion the reason DXOne is not getting traction and the reason Forza, Tigerpaw, etc were not a success comes down to 2 areas, (1) you need to recreate the entire connected Ecosystem and (2) you need a very flexible Contract Billing module.

 

Juice has been building out the Ecosystem for years and we have been working on the concept of a Power App for contract billing, an app that does at least everything that eAuto current does.

 

Plan B would be dealers funding us building the contract billing App and adding other ERP choices to the Ecosystem. This is a concept, we are publishing it to gauge interest, no commitment yet. Juice would need to add a complete new team and propose asking everyone to double your current spend with Juice. Your contract would remain month to month with the option to drop Plan B. Signing up for this process just says you are interested. Our guestimate is 1 to 2 years of double payments.

 

We plan support for Dynamics ERP (F&O + BC), Noetics & DXOne (if they agree) and QuickBooks. The combination of QB + Contract Billing Power App could be a solution for small dealers. The Ecosystem would still give you all the automation, integration, and reporting available today. Whether Online Payments, ID815 workflow, Power BI dashboards etc, as well as connectivity to leasing partners, Manus, distribution etc.

 

Maybe you don't leave eAuto, you get some leverage and ECI stops raising rates and starts investing in dev. We want you to have options. To be clear we are big eAuto fans, nothing comes close to it today.

 

Clients who don't sign up initially and later decide they want to, would need to catch up on double payments.

 

The Ecosystem includes; CRMs, CPQ, Marketing, DCAs, eCommerce, PSAs, Online Payments, POs, Leasing, Distribution, Manus, Shipping, Customer ticketing, Commissions, Power BI, Surveys, etc

 

If we get enough interest, say 50% of clients sign up, then we will do a webinar to discuss.