Software successfully files thousands of certificates

Frank Keane Holdings (FKH) have been one of the leading Irish motor distributors and retailers since 1967. Their distribution branch delivers Mitsubishi motors and FUSO Trucks to over 40 outlets in Ireland. Meanwhile, their retail division owns and operates large-scale retail outlets in Dublin. Currently, they have two BMW dealerships, and two Volkswagen dealerships in the region.

Recent EU legislation requires vehicle importers to supply digitally signed Certificates of Compliance (CoC) to their relevant registration authorities. Without these, dealers can’t license their vehicles for motor tax or receive registration numbers from the Vehicle Registration Office (VRO). This left the respective distribution operations within the group in charge of importing Mitsubishi and Fuso vehicles with a looming deadline, and a mountain of paperwork to complete.

In Ireland, the Revenue services set a hard deadline. As a result, FKH needed to have all the certificates digitally signed and submitted by the 12th of September, 2016. With this date fast approaching, they couldn’t have finished the paperwork on time. Their Dealer network was extensive, meaning they had tens of thousands of cars that needed certificates signed. Unfortunately, if they didn’t get it completed their business would have faced a disaster – they couldn’t sell cars that couldn’t be registered or taxed.

There was simply no way they could finish it manually. One franchise alone had a backlog of nearly 20,000 cars they needed to process – solely from 2016. If they filed them all by hand, it would take 2-3 minutes per car. With so many in the inventory, this would have taken their staff three months to complete. The business simply didn’t have that time to spare.

FKH needed a reliable, accurate and robust automatic system to do the work for them. While they have solid in-house programming expertise in FKH, web services were a gap in the skill sets. Since software development services are a specialist field and they were running out of time; they began looking for a solid custom software development company.

They were already aware of ActionPoint’s reputation in the IT space, and knew their broad range of IT services included custom software development. FKH got in touch, while also scoping out some other vendors. When they completed the comparison, it was clear ActionPoint were the best option. They analysed exactly what was needed, could deliver it on time – and importantly were cost effective.

ActionPoint delivered on their promises. Their team was fully flexible throughout the project; even working through some issues that arose during integration testing with Revenue’s live system. By the end of the project, FKH:

• were fully compliant with EU regulations
• had saved three months of man power
• had handled a back log of over 17,000 cars

Ultimately, their software development services saved FKH a considerable amount of time, money and paperwork.