Motor Age: Earlier, you mentioned that as stewards of this business, we have failed the industry, and you were talking about fully integrated applications. Tell us what you meant by that.
Lagges: We've made it very difficult for the supply chain to get information down to the consumers, whether the consumer is the do-it-yourselfer or the do-it-for-me or the professional. And if you look at everywhere we've broken down...all of the systems that a shop needs to run a business are fragmented and not focused on work efficiency. Even though there are major efforts to get this done, there are still pockets of proprietary systems that don't enable the customer (the technician) to see the best choice for that application and part and get the information they need to fix the car. They don't have a system in place that has all the information they need to fix the car, all in one integrated scenario. What they have are a bunch of disparate systems, and that's inefficient.
Motor Age: What's ALLDATA's stance on proposed Right to Repair legislation?
Lagges: At ALLDATA, we're completely supportive of Right to Repair, but we do think, like many situations, it's a very complex story. We have access to all the OEM information, and we make sure we provide all that data to our shops. So for us it's really a gray area of defining, is it the Right to Repair initiatives that are pushing this access, or would this access come on its own. One of the things that's clear, even though we have access today and we're providing that to our customers, is there's no guarantee that there's any long-term approach to how we have access to the data. So one of the things that we're concerned about as stewards of the industry is that the message we keep delivering to the consumers is we don't have access to the data, and that's going to paint a picture in the consumer's mind that maybe they need to take the car to the dealership or the OEMs and not give the aftermarket a chance to do it, and we need to be very careful that we're communicating the right story. While it's not black or white — (that) the Right to Repair (proposal) is working or not working — we do know it is helping create a dialogue, and we need to elevate the dialogue or evolve the dialogue now to more of a partnership.
