Harris Golf Cars’ journey through the dynamic landscape of the golf industry epitomizes resilience and innovation.
Since their first store opened in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1979, coinciding with Yamaha’s launch of its first golf cart—Harris has expanded to three more locations, including Sugar Grove, IL, Sturtevant, WI, and Blair, NE.
Each step of their growth has been marked by a spirit of enterprise and a readiness to tackle the next challenge.
As the industry evolved, so did Harris. The expansion brought complexities that demanded a robust management system. About a decade ago, they embraced ASPEN, a move that opened up new avenues for them.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with Jenny Stecklein, Harris’s controller, to find out more about their remarkable journey and discover how ASPEN has been instrumental in their ongoing success.
What’s your favorite feature in ASPEN?
Jenny: “I really like the rental module. It’s probably the most underutilized module within ASPEN. It allows so much flexibility in regards to how to track your units, how to verify your capacity.
Harris Golf Cars has a lot of long-term leases as well as short-term rentals. It was definitely a pain point for our business to be able to track all of that. I suspect that there are other dealerships, not just golf cars, that have the same circumstance.
What improvements have you seen at the dealership because of ASPEN?
Jenny: “We’ve incorporated using the barcoding functionality, which has allowed us better tracking and given us better data, real-time information.
Also, the AIM functionality has allowed our people on the road to be able to update things in real-time, so we’re not waiting for them to come back at six o’clock at night to tell us what they’ve used, how much time spent, and so forth.
In the last three years, we’ve implemented a lot of big things with the software.”
What advice do you have for somebody who is in the market for a DMS?
Jenny: “Ask the users. Ask the people who are going to be living with the data, who are going to be using not only the output but also the things that are going into the system.
Get their feedback because those are really the people that are going to make it happen. They’re the ones that are going to make it a success.”