True Track
Blue sky thinking,
cloud-based technology A pioneer of the first cloud-hosted dealer management system for the motorcycle trade, Jez Shave, managing director of True Track Software, extols the advantages of his ground-breaking system. Rick Kemp reports
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Jez Shave
38
AUGUST 2022
rue Track Software has been around long enough to inspire confidence in its main product: Pyramid Dealer Management System (DMS), a cloud-hosted DMS specifically tailored to meet the requirements of the motorcycle industry. Pyramid has been developed by Jez Shave, and being cloud-based, it does away with expensive servers and can be accessed from multiple devices anywhere in the world. The company began trading in 2012 with Shave as a sole trader; the last six years have seen it operate as a limited company with ten staff. Initially Shave had been working at another DMS company, Catalyst, but left to join D&K Motorcycles, which provided him with the opportunity to work with what is now the UK’s largest trade and classic bike dealership for a couple of years before setting up on his own. He had no intention of returning to the motorcycle industry, but that’s what happened. “I ended up rewriting my own dealer management system. Coding is in my blood – my father was an electronics engineer at Lucas Aerospace as well as a programmer, and he was the one who convinced me that cloud-based product was the future. He came up with the names True Track and Pyramid DMS. I’d never written a programme, but I knew I could do it because everything was in my head. I knew exactly what I wanted.” While at D&K, Shave helped to streamline the business. Through writing an eBay integration programme for D&K, he met Harry Sales, his current business partner. They worked well together, as they both used the same programming language and devised
a DMS system that would turn the business around. At that time, D&K was importing containers of bike parts from China and selling the contents online. Shave’s reporting and analysis allowed them to see that they were being ‘busy fools’. Over time the spares operation was wound down in favour of other aspects of the business. After leaving D&K, Shave and Sales started working with MotoGB, where they spent a few years developing the company’s B2B system, which in turn was polished into a DMS (Pyramid DMS) and operated successfully at both D&K and MotoGB. As a result, they then set up on their own. “What sets Pyramid apart from other dealer management systems is that we can modify the core programme to work with existing internal systems,” explains Shave. Pyramid now has more than a hundred dealers on its books, most of whom have come through personal recommendation. Other corporate clients include ASE Global Automotive Solutions, Ducati, Triumph, Suzuki, Honda and most recently, Completely Motoring. “We can cater for the larger customers right down to the one-man bands – all are equally important to us. On top of the standard system, we can offer e-commerce integration. We’ve got a warehouse module and the B2B system, which Herald Motorcycles has just taken up, and we can also handle warranty claims and the customer portal.” As Shave points out, lockdown did Pyramid a few favours as, with people working from home, the system could equally be accessed via a laptop or tablet.
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