I started my 1st dealership in 1993, Color Systems, it still holds the record as the fastest growing company in San Diego, it was out of control growth. When I started my 2nd dealership, Imaging Technologies, I put all the software controls in place, showed them at an eAutomate User Group (EUG) meet, and everyone said, "That's really cool."

When I sold Color Systems to Kyocera in 2008, I started CEO Juice, and shortly afterward, partnered with Mike (you can see a little history here). Our initial plan was to offer these automated processes to other dealers; we called them DTFs back then, but you can think of them as Agents now. The plan was to have a library accessible for a monthly fee. We quickly started hearing that "my DTF doesn't work" and discovered that they weren't being set up correctly, had bad data, or had an odd business model.

We quickly pivoted to a white-glove model. Getting the DTF in place was the easy part, ensuring the data was accurate and answering questions on best practice became the bulk of our work and still is. Today, the majority of our tickets are still on how to use eAuto correctly.

Back in the early days of Juice, dealers would go to eugonline.org (EUG) to get answers on best practice etc. Mike was one of the EUG founders and the president for the 1st few years. The EUG started giving an award to the most knowledgeable and helpful people online; they called it the Ashley Award after the person who won the most. Juice hired Ashley and others who were knowledgeable and helpful.

Today, most of our clients use Power BI for reporting, and we have moved on to newer AI tools and are preparing for Agentic AI. It is still the same SQL database on the back end, same as Noetics offers, and AI Agents are the future; AI Agents don't care what the user interface looks like. I really don't believe now is the time to change ERPs, but it certainly is the time to get AI Agents in place. I don't see AI embedded in an ERP as the future; rather, AI will remain its own tech stack, and Juice plans to continue owning the industry AI stack.

Something Big Is Happening talks about the rapid rate of technology change, Juice is at the bleeding edge and hopes to stay there.

The rate to hire the Juice team starts at $300 per month. Your other option is to hire your own "Ashley". Odoo looks like a great platform, however I will be very surprised if it can bill a large complicated CPC agreement. Large dealers like Milner and Perry moved to Forza and then had to move back to eAutomate and the exercise cost them millions each. We don't need any more smoke and mirrors, post how many dealers you have using Noetics and how many industry support people you have. You can see our team and their experience here and you can see our client list here. Typically ERP manufacturers like ECI and Quickbooks don't have Office Technology industry experts, I assume Odoo is the same. We have Power BI dashboards with CoPilot embedded and we still get tickets with questions.