Federal-Mogul Motorparts has won a number of awards from the National Catalog Managers Association (NCMA), including a Gold Award for its Garage Gurus mobile application. The app is part of the company's larger Garage Gurus program of technician-facing training and technology.
Tell me about Garage Gurus and how the mobile app fits in.
It's part of our Tech First initiative, which our CEO has pushed, and the goal is really to engage the technician better. We have taken a good, hard look at what the things are that we do that touch the technician, and that the technician actually appreciates, enjoys and benefits from.
The mobile app was one of those things. We have more than 20,000 users now in the U.S. and Canada.
The mobile app first launched in 2013. What changes have you made?
We have a license-plate-to-catalog lookup feature that works almost like a little magic trick. If you can't scan the VIN, you can use the license plate. You can connect to the Tech Line directly out of the app as well.
We support iPhone and Android right now, and we're actually thinking about supporting Windows Mobile or Windows 10 in the next expansion.
How do you maintain support of the mobile operating systems as the mobile phone platforms are updated?
We do all of the development and the graphics. We work with a mobile developer, and they code all of the changes for us that Apple and Android push out. We made a commitment not to outsource the actual development work, but we do use an outside firm for the coding. We have control over the functionality, the back-end database, and everything else that folds into it. Our turnaround has been pretty good. We had iOS 8 support out within 60 days.
What do you think is the biggest challenge you face in terms of mobility?
I think the biggest challenge or opportunity is making sure that when you look at the enterprise and all of the touchpoints: customer service, ordering inventory, all of these things you want your customers to see at any given time. You want to make sure as you scale up that you have a chance to ensure you can get the right information out of these systems, or overhaul them so they are more mobile compliant.
The last thing you want to do is go out with 75 percent of what Federal-Mogul has. You have to connect all of the back-end systems, or people will think the catalog is a desktop-only tool, and that you can't use it on a mobile platform.
If the mobile apps aren't fully connected to the database, then it's not going to work. Anytime I'm faced with something that doesn’t offer me what I need on the mobile side, I park it and switch over to a desktop or laptop. We want to make sure our services are set up to accommodate mobile platforms.
There's so much activity outside of our industry that one luxury we have is that we're a little bit behind. We can see what Google and Salesforce.com are doing. There's really interesting stuff going on in the mobile space, and you can borrow ideas from those that have been there before you make a huge, cutting-edge investment.
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