Active Green+Ross (Active) is proud to be one of the premier providers of tires and automotive repair services in Ontario. This privately owned company is based in Etobicoke, a suburb of Toronto, and boasts over 40 locations across southern and central Ontario.

At the time of our engagement, all Active locations were running a DOS-based standalone management application that managed pretty much all aspects of the business: customer lists, inventory, invoicing, A/R, A/P, customer follow-up, etc. Most Active locations are franchises, and all franchisees are required to report sales and other figures back to head office in order to calculate various licensing, advertising, and royalty payments. This information was readily available from the existing business management application, but was then transcribed onto preprinted forms and faxed to head office, where they were transcribed once again into an Excel spreadsheet for management reporting purposes.

The information being exchanged was too important to entrust to a process that involved too many steps, relied too much on manual entry, and was very error prone. The entire process, from franchisee to head office, took more than two days to complete.

Because Active was planning on eventually replacing the aging DOS-based system at their sites, the solution had to be able to dovetail with both the existing process and an as-yet unknown Windows-based application.

At the time, most Active locations had Internet access. KMP proposed a web-based system that allowed the franchisee to type the sales figures into a simple onscreen form, rather than write them down onto paper. Once this was done, the franchisee’s monthly submission was reviewed by management at head office and then flagged as accepted. Thus approved, the numbers were then taken into consideration for the purposes of management reporting. We built over a dozen reports using simple ASP and HTML scripting, all available via secure login for both franchisees and head office.

Active has since migrated their locations to their new Windows-based business management application, and because our web solution was built in anticipation of this eventuality, it remains in use today.

Active eliminated the errors, paper flow, and large time delay inherent in the manual system. All sales figures are consolidated securely in one database, which not only acts as the back end for the existing web reporting, but also permits Active to slice and dice the information in ways they may not have previously thought possible.