Business intelligence company TARGIT says it has always been focused on helping businesses of all kinds understand and manage the full value of the data that they collect. In the last several years, the company has focused on being particularly useful for ag equipment dealers by providing expense reports, performance reviews, building technician efficiency reports and other useful data-driven items for dealers. 

“We made a conscious shift to focus on this industry a few years back just because we noticed there was a lot of need,” says Tim McGuire, an account executive for TARGIT.

Noticing that dealers of all sizes — those with many locations as well as those with only 1 or 2 storefronts — all had the same data reporting practices, TARGIT saw an opportunity to step in and provide some assistance.

“We saw a lot of Excel or even manually curated reports and little to no dashboards being used,” McGuire says. “Most of these organizations were not running what we would consider to be data-driven businesses. As a result, critical business questions weren’t being answered fast enough.”

According to McGuire, over 99% of the business that TARGIT does in North America is now with ag equipment dealers. The company has added over 80 dealers as clients in the last two years alone.

Another way that TARGIT says it has thrived with this particular customer base is by building an experienced consulting team made up of individuals with industry-specific knowledge.

“They’ve all worked in the heavy equipment space, either on the side of the DMS (dealer management system) vendors or on the side of the dealer,” McGuire says. “Each one of them has 10 or more years of experience. Having them on our team helps us bring our knowledge of good business intelligence reporting platforms together with their knowledge of the heavy equipment industry, and we can then focus on industry-specific KPIs and best practices.”

McGuire adds that these senior business intelligence consultants are able to help build out the backend of the data while also providing dealers with suggestions for best practices and advice about what other dealers are doing on the front end.

TARGIT has built specific dashboards to fit with data sources from a variety of DMS solutions, such as IntelliDealer and DIS .

“The back end or the data warehousing side of it has a built-in software component to help automate about 80% of a solution,” McGuire says. “Our goal is to make things as easy as possible and help save dealers time.”

McGuire estimates that TARGIT is able to significantly cut down on the time it would take other data resources to come up with a solution for a company.

“If you go out and hire one of these other dedicated data resources, it can take years to get a full solution where every single department has reports and dashboards that they can use on a daily basis,” he says. “We shortcut that effort by about 70-80%. We also insulate you from a lot of risks. You could hire a resource who might build something and then leave, but we aren’t going anywhere. For all those reasons, we have been a great fit for a lot of dealers and organizations, and we are going to continue investing time and resources into this industry.”

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