A Thorn in Our Side
For many months, we have been battling an intermittent problem where ancillary profit center pass activations (vacuums, self-serve, air machines, etc.) would fire under a delayed time period. A few sites experienced this repetitively and most sites not at all. We had a breakthrough last week during extended testing and have found the cause and implemented a permanent solution. There is a code update that needs to be applied to the Site Controller to prevent the situation. If you are experiencing this problem, please open a ticket at https://www.dencartechnology.com/helpdesk and we will get you squared away.
Improving Service
On the topic of service, we have heard from a few of you that you are not satisfied with the engagement of our support team for more complex problems, configurations, or lingering issues. We have been growing rapidly and apologize for not meeting expectations. We are currently shipping about 8 pay stations per week and have been adding support staff to accommodate the growth, but not quickly enough. Until we are fully staffed and get the experience back to where we expect, we are implementing an extra management review of support. If you have a lingering issue, be it hardware or software, and need an extra review, please email ticketreview@dencartechnology.com with your existing ticket number, a short summary of your experience (where did we fall short and what impact the issue is having on your business), and your contact information (name, email, cell), and we will set up time with you to dig in. In the not too distant future, we will be separating out software and hardware support to allow our team to scale faster.
Product Update
Retrofit doors and Virtual Pay Stations have been stabilized! We had plenty of egg on our face when the first few installs bombed. Fortunately, our first few customers dug in and helped us uncover the root cause of the problems. The manufacturer, processor, and our development team worked closely together to uncover the unique circumstances that resulted in application failure. We developed a series of updates, configuration changes, and application control that has thus far proved successful. We are opening back up ordering for both retro doors and virtual pay stations and are advising anyone that received units that we asked to hold on install to go ahead and install. We are ready to enable your sites. For units previously shipped, please plan for an additional hour of updates to be applied in the field as part of scheduled turnup. (Make sure you schedule a specific time for the turnup with our helpdesk) For anyone with orders pending, we are working through our build schedule to plan definitive dates for delivery. As many of you know, our lead times for production became exasperated. We took the steps necessary to double our production and ability to ship, so we can eliminate our backlog. We are in the process of optimizing our delivery dates and will update order delivery as appropriate.
Training
We are finally getting settled into our new facility and we can now provide hands-on training for distributors, installers, and/or self-installers. Installation training is currently being provided 1:1 on a scheduled basis. For schedule planning purposes, plan to arrive late morning to mid-day, attend training in the afternoon/evening. Stay the night. Return in the morning so we can answer all the questions that you thought of while sleeping, or not sleeping. Depart in the afternoon. If you are flying in, the closest airport is Akron-Canton (CAK) which is about 15 minutes away. Alternately, the Cleveland (CLE) airport is only about 45 minutes away. Please contact Sam Phillips @ samphillips@dencartechnology.com to schedule training.
As a reminder, we do provide online recorded training for the Customer Management Portal and some specific recorded training on recurring topics like Fleet management. We also provide live weekly Q&A training on Wednesdays at 10:00AM Eastern.
Operational Focus
We mentioned in our February update that operational improvement is our primary focus for the rest of 2025. Optimization of existing products and services will consume most of our time this year. If you didn’t see the update, please link back here: https://www.dencartechnology.com/blog/releases-3/state-of-the-business-update-14
See You Soon!
We will be at the ICA https://www.carwash.org/events later this month showcasing the products and services previously announced and hope you can stop by. We are also hosting a Saturday morning session titled “The Truth About Unattended Memberships” See the details here: https://thecarwashshow.com/education#session:677 For anyone wanting to gain insight from your industry peers, there will be a lineup of experienced operators sharing their experiences with memberships in the unattended space.
Editorial comment: we have received numerous calls asking if our pricing is still valid. The short answer is YES! We began making structural pivots to our supply chain about 18 months ago in anticipation of major tariff impacts. The decisions we made awhile ago now appear to be correct. We won’t be able to hold pricing forever, but we are doing our best to provide our unique sales approach on every device we can at a price that lets you buy the boat too. (talk to Chris at the ICA about that one)