Today We have the pleasure to talk about our new Oil monitoring system - MCO GO, the latest solution that PIUSI released for the garage equipment business.
The inception and the evolution
Through the years PIUSI has traced the path for these kinds of systems, in 1996 when the first MCO was released the spread of oil monitoring systems was just beginning but we were strongly convinced that this necessity would be more and more important in the following period.
17 years later there were 5 main providers, including PIUSI, of those solutions, plus a number of local manufacturers that developed different country based systems, available on the market.
The features of all were roughly the same:
- oil transactions tracking
- tank level indication
- data export and little else
Even the installation/infrastructure was so similar, everything wired, a lot of cables involved and a number of hours spent setting up the systems. Some pioneers experienced radio technologies but with probably more headaches than benefits, the wireless world in the 2000s was vastly different from now.
In 2013 we knew it was the right time to think about something new, our MCO system was one of the first born and its architecture needed to be upgraded, we had the choice of where to address our development: continue to provide the same limited amount of features migrating to a more modern technology or re-think about the entire workshop operating workflow.
Evolution vs Revolution
We visited a number of garages all over the world, from the smallest to the most complex, researching modus operandi and habits, until we noticed a common issue in all of them: regardless of the management system used (or not used) by the dealership, operators and mechanics use written notes to track work orders: a time-consuming and error-prone practice.
The idea was there: try to gap the bridge that exists in between the office and the garage, but how?
With a complete garage management system that allows you to track every single operation that can happen inside a workshop, from an oil change to a body repair. A system able to run as a small dealer management system (DMS) for the businesses that are not equipped with or that can be fully integrated with one of them.
Everything built on an infrastructure, LAN or Wi-Fi, that can take advantage of the existing local network without the need to create an ad-hoc one.
It was 2015 and the MCO 2.0 was born (see presentation here https://youtu.be/uGtAz0uUuuI and product info and video here https://www.piusi.com/products/mco-2-0).
