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Volkswagen Revs Up QuickSell Commerce

3 March 2000

Volkswagen Revs Up QuickSell Commerce; CeBIT Announcement Heralds Economical WWW-Retail Convergence

    HANOVER, Germany--March 2, 2000--Volkswagen is deploying QuickSell Commerce (QSC) in a rapidly moving pilot to speed information and operations for its dealership network.
    The announcement came during QSC's launch at CeBIT, the world's largest technology exposition.
    QuickSell Commerce, by Sales Management Systems (SMS) of Anaheim, Calif., has been accepted by VAPS, the association representing German VW and Audi dealerships. A basic agreement has been concluded with VAPS to deploy QuickSell Commerce throughout most of its 2,900 dealerships over the next 36 months.
    VW selected QuickSell Commerce for "its integrated economy of Web-connecting so many dealerships; the product's ability to integrate with legacy and projected applications; and QSC's easily customizable POS buttons on its transaction screen," according to Niels Wosnitza, project leader at Cogito Consulting GmbH, chosen by VW and VAPS to implement the project.
    "VW's plan is to deploy the convergence and interconnectivity benefits of QuickSell Commerce to many dealerships annually," said Thomas Pluskat, general manager at Cogito.
    "Dealers will use Sales Management Systems' QSC to upload and download information to VAUDIS, an enterprise application designed for automobile sales," Pluskat said.
    QSC's on-screen POS buttons are an easy-to-use human interface connecting the POS system to the VAUDIS dealer system. Buttons speed and facilitate two-way interchange of transaction and accounting data for orders and sales.
    POS buttons invoke Java scripts. Internet Explorer 5 transports Microsoft Internet Information Server data via HTTP. QuickSell Commerce's XML capability ensures that corporate data can be used in dealership transactions and vice versa. SMS will support Oracle, the strategic database used by VW's car-dealer environment.
    "The global Internet backbone for business communication is already in place," said Wosnitza. "QuickSell Commerce is the glue that helps retailers use it economically. Volkswagen car dealers will be the first."
    QuickSell Commerce incorporates complete point-of-sale and retail management. QSC improves upon its predecessors, which won two Microsoft Retail Application Developer Awards and an approval from a joint IBM-National Retail Federation user-satisfaction study.
    Contact SMS at 800/322-3052, 714/701-1600 or sales@smspos.com. Its URL is http://www.smspos.com.
    Cogito provides systems and consulting services to companies such as German Telecomm and Volkswagen and the FC Bayern-Munich soccer team. Contact Niels Wosnitza of Cogito POS at 011-49-2173-901-155.