Arkona Inc., which provides dealer management solutions, announced on April 17 new enhanced reporting features through the complete integration and support of Crystal Reports(R) by Crystal Decisions(R) to the Ensign Dealer Management Suite.

This new functionality is a significant enhancement to the reporting capabilities currently available within the Ensign Suite and extends the applications' hallmark benefit of complete flexibility and adaptability to

user requirements.

Integrating Crystal Reports with the dealer management suite gives Arkona customers the ability to get customized reports quicker and easier either by requesting custom reports through Arkona Professional Services or developing the reports themselves. The click-and-drag graphical user interface allows clients to create their own customized

reports with little or no technical training, according to Richard Holland, president of Arkona.

"Using Crystal Reports helps us to be extremely responsive to our customers' requests," Holland said. "Each of our customers is unique in how they manage their business and we now have increased our ability to quickly provide them with customized information."

"We know first hand what a significant advantage this functionality can deliver," said John Haupt, general manager of Tri-County Ford-Mercury, Inc. "We needed some modifications to one of the Ensign reports so we called Arkona. They were able to develop the customized report and deliver it to us in a few hours. The report was in a format that my accounting department

could easily understand (Microsoft Excel), and it saved me hours of work and hassle."

Crystal Reports provides customized reporting designed to enable interactive information analysis. The software is designed for integration within existing applications. The combination of the Ensign Dealer Management Suite and Crystal Reports ensures that the

dealership's data can be accessed, analyzed and reported on in a variety of formats, according to Susan Richards, vice president of marketing communications at Arkona. "The technology is a natural fit for Arkona's relational database structure where information is always present and accessible," Richards said.

"Crystal Reports is an industry standard in delivering rich content from virtually any data source and publishing it to the Web or your PC in a variety of formats," said Tony Wind, vice president of product development at Crystal Decisions. "We are pleased to provide flexible custom reporting capabilities to the auto dealership arena in conjunction with Arkona's

dealer management solutions."

As part of this solution, Arkona has developed a suite of standard reports using Crystal Reports that will be distributed to the customer base. "Customers will have a head start in applying this new capability by either using the reports distributed by Arkona or modifying the standard reports for their own use," Richards said.

Pricing for reports created by Arkona are based on the nature and the scope of the request. The price of Crystal Reports and Arkona's Data Dictionaries is $900.

For more information on both products and for more information on the Ensign Dealer Management Suite contact an Arkona representative in your area by calling 866-478-6364 or 801-501-7100.

To find out more about Arkona products and services go to www.arkona.com.

About Arkona

Founded in 1996, Arkona is a public company involved in integrated information management and data distribution solutions for the automotive industry.

Arkona's Ensign Dealer Management Suite leads the market in technologically superior e-business solutions for automotive dealers that

fully integrate back office systems with a retail Web presence. In this market Arkona is an Application Service Providers (ASP).

For more information visit the Arkona Web site at www.arkona.com.