This growing Australian startup never tires of using Claris FileMaker to drive innovation.

The first company of its kind in Australia, Mobile Tyre Shop makes the process of replacing your car’s tyres a delightful one. The company offers the ability to search, compare and purchase tyres online, and then have those tyres conveniently replaced at home or work. Technicians travel directly to their customers and professionally change their tyres on-site, eliminating all the hassle.

In order to scale, Mobile Tyre Shop decided it needed an ERP system. Initially, the company opted for expensive enterprise software that was too limiting for the company’s need to quickly adapt and innovate. When the off-the-shelf platform failed, Mobile Tyre Shop turned to Claris FileMaker to digitally transform their entire business, one piece at a time.

Not an “out-of-the-box business.”

Replacing the tyres on your car? That’s what Travis Osborne, CEO at Mobile Tyre Shop, likes to call “a grudge purchase,” a process riddled with inconvenience and unknowns.

“You don't have visibility of pricing, and only a limited selection of tyres to choose from,” Travis explained. “And it's the hassle of waiting in a greasy workshop. You’re unsure what they're doing with your car.”

Travis wanted to solve these problems for customers when he founded Mobile Tyre Shop in 2012. The company — the first of its kind in Australia — sends crews directly to a home or office to fit and replace people’s tyres.

The company grew quickly in its first few years, even earning Travis an invitation to appear on the TV show Shark Tank.

To keep up with its growth, Mobile Tyre Shop needed a business operating system, and fast. The team was having to manually schedule customer visits, which took too long and wasn’t scalable.

“We needed a CRM system or even an ERP system, a whole organizational system to keep everything together,” said Jamie Cartwright, COO of Mobile Tyre Shop.

Mobile Tyre Shop initially chose an off-the-shelf platform, which ultimately took two years to implement and a significant expense in both cost and time. That meant the company essentially put any innovation on hold to wait for the new system to launch.

According to Jamie, when the system finally did get implemented, the ERP didn’t work like the company had hoped. Sales dropped by about $250,000 in the first month of the new software’s implementation.

“It wasn't so much the failure of the software,” Jamie explained. “The software is what the software is. It was more a failure on our part to recognize we're not an out-of-the-box business, and there’s no out-of-the-box product that would fit our business.”

What Mobile Tyre Shop needed, Jamie realized, was custom software. The prepackaged software they’d gone with was too rigid. It had stifled the innovative processes that were at the heart of Mobile Tyre Shop’s business model.

The team started looking for alternatives.

Reigniting and revving up FileMaker.

Jamie remembered Claris FileMaker, a platform he’d used in a past life as a musician nearly four decades prior. At that time, he’d used FileMaker to create an app to assemble an artist database, organize a list of music venues, and create musician contracts for his entertainment agency.

Though he suspected FileMaker might be able to help create the custom software Mobile Tyre Shop needed, Jamie wanted to do his due diligence. He researched Claris online, vetted the platform, and got in touch with a member of the Claris team who confirmed Jamie’s hopes that FileMaker could do what Mobile Tyre needed – and more.

The Claris team also put him in touch with Digital Fusion, a Claris Partner, who helped answer questions about FileMaker and scope projects.

Afterward, Jamie had to pose the idea to Travis, his CEO, who was understandably cautious following the costly failure of the last ERP system.

But Jamie proposed starting small and gradually expanding the use of FileMaker to prove its value.

"I have to say, I was a little skeptical at the time that a product could do all the things it was said to do,” Travis recalled. “We were in a situation where we'd already spent a lot of money on an ERP solution, and this was a step-by-step result. Jamie assured me we could do it in a staged format, which was really a great solution for our business.”

The first few FileMaker-fueled wins.

Jamie knew he’d have to be strategic about how to introduce FileMaker technology into the business. He knew he needed a few quick wins to prove the value of FileMaker.

Working with Digital Fusion, Jamie’s first project was integrating FileMaker with the website.

Before FileMaker, the Mobile Tyre Shop team was manually entering data about various tyres and tyre companies into their online store. After the FileMaker integration, the data automatically fed into Mobile Tyre Shop’s website.

“It was really just a way that I could justify the expense to Travis and get the permission to spend some money,” explained Jamie. "We just want to work on the web interface so I don't have to use hundreds of Excel spreadsheets."

It was a simple initial project and a relatively small win, but it made an impact on Travis.

“I remember the day quite well when we realized we had the right solution,” Travis said.“It was a great relief for the business so we could concentrate on other parts of the business. Our relationship with FileMaker has been an incredible journey since we started with the very basics of feeding the e-commerce platform.”

It was all Travis needed to see to become a FileMaker fan.

In fact, Jamie and the Digital Fusion team weren’t even finished with the website project before Travis asked for more.

“Travis was saying, ‘Oh, we need that for the call center. How can we get the call center access to that?’” Jamie said. “So what we did with the call center was we created a nice customized quote screen, something that had never been done and was quite amazing for the call center to be able to [instantly] quote a customer.”

These first few projects jumpstarted what would become a three-year-and-counting relationship between Mobile Tyre Shop and FileMaker.

A custom operating system built piece-by-piece.

Encouraged by the initial wins, Jamie continued to integrate more business functions into FileMaker, transforming additional solutions into one comprehensive workplace operating system.

With FileMaker, Mobile Tyre Shop automated and optimized various aspects of their operations:

• Integrated Google Analytics data to their call center. As soon as a potential customer calls Mobile Tyre Shop, their unique Google serial number — known as the Google Click ID (GCID) — is imported into the Mobile Tyre Shop’s system. Then, when a customer makes a purchase, this data is fed back into Google Analytics, allowing the team to optimize its campaigns to target similar audiences.
• Developed route optimization for their fleet of vans. Before FileMaker, a scheduler on the Mobile Tyre Shop team would round up the travel time between jobs to make it easier to calculate. For example, they might round up a 20-minute drive to 30 minutes. Integrating route optimization into their FileMaker app saved crews about 10 minutes per job — nearly an hour each day. The result: an entire additional job per day, per van, without additional cost.
• Created a customer portal for self-scheduling appointments. Self-service made it possible for customers to schedule and change their own appointments, using a FileMaker-powered web browser on their smartphone.
• Integrated with eBay online store. Mobile Tyre Shop used FileMaker to integrate its online store with eBay. This integration lets customers purchase their tyres from eBay through the Mobile Tyre Shop store and automatically process the purchase data into the Mobile Tyre system.
• Created internal live chat messaging system. The team needed a way to record communication with customers and gather customer data. They developed a live chat system that automatically saved internal conversations about specific customers to respective files.
• Built an app for in-the-field technicians. With FileMaker Go, the Mobile Tyre Shop crew can use their app to find out where and when appointments are, which tyres each job requires, communicate with customers, and plan the route to the next appointment.
• Developed a barcoding system to keep track of tyre inventory. Mobile Tyre Shop uses FileMaker to keep track of its inventory, scanning each individual tyre at every step of the process. This way, crews can guarantee they have the right tyres for every appointment.
• Automated all SMS and email communications with customers. All Mobile Tyre Shop customers receive emails and text messages throughout the process, from booking confirmation to job completion. This is a crucial part of the company’s customer service offerings.
• Integrated ChatGPT into customer communication. One of the most innovative uses of Claris FileMaker was the integration of AI for customer communications. By leveraging ChatGPT, Mobile Tyre Shop ensured all text messages sent by their tyre technicians were professionally written, enhancing the overall customer experience. Additionally, automated emails and text messages kept customers informed at every step of the process, significantly improving customer satisfaction.
• Created dashboards for visibility into business data. Mobile Tyre Shop used FileMaker to create a global dashboard that reflects the entire business and internal culture at a glance. “FileMaker has given us that whole ethos and so we know when a team is busy because we can see it on the dashboard, or we know when a team member is actually running behind or doing a good job,” Jamie raved.
• Built an HR module that optimizes recruitment and onboarding processes. This module optimizes the way Mobile Tyre Shop recruits and onboards staff, and it informs company employees of policies and procedures.
• Introduced OCR to create automated invoicing system. By introducing optical character recognition (OCR) into their finance department, Mobile Tyre Shop automated their invoicing system rather than manually entering an invoice against every purchase order. “This was a massive efficiency gain for us,” Jamie stated.

Jamie’s strategy of using FileMaker to continuously improve the business one project at a time allowed Mobile Tyre Shop to create truly custom software.

“This idea of making gradual improvements ensures we test and learn from them, then repeat improvements with new areas of the business – it’s made FileMaker the right solution for us,” Jamie said. “We can work one-on-one with a developer and chip away at ideas and projects so the business becomes more efficient and more scalable.”

Today, Mobile Tyre Shop runs its entire business on Claris FileMaker.

“The impact that FileMaker has had on our business has been invaluable,” Travis exclaimed. “It’s really given us the backbone and the data and the information to enable us to grow our business.”

“My journey with FileMaker has surprised me.”

With the full power of FileMaker behind the team, Mobile Tyre Shop is now exploring the entire Claris platform. They’re looking into how to use Claris Studio with the customer self-schedule portal, for example.

What interests Jamie and his team most, though, is testing new and emerging technology through FileMaker, including additional AI opportunities.

“Claris could be at the forefront of AI with its technology to give us things,” Jamie said. “I'm looking forward to being able to have a prompt on the screen where we can type in things that are quite random and get responses from our data with it.”

FileMaker not only transformed Mobile Tyre Shop but Jamie’s role within the company, too.

“My role is really directing where to focus our efforts based on problems we’re seeing and new solutions we can introduce,” Jamie explained. “I’m looking at where we can go next with FileMaker to create some efficiencies and obviously turn them into return on investment for the business.”

Jamie is known within Mobile Tyre Shop as the go-to person for driving efficiencies and innovation. He says you never know where FileMaker will take you — in business and in life.

“My whole relationship and journey with FileMaker has actually surprised me,” he said. “Going from a kid just out of school, developing some little tools that help me with a little business venture, to what Mobile Tyre Shop has today. It has really surprised me.”

Discover how to gain efficiencies and experience continuous business wins.

When Jamie suspected Claris FileMaker was the custom software needed at Mobile Tyre Shop, he reached out to a Claris rep for advice, and ultimately, was introduced to a Claris Partner. You can do that, too.

Check out App Success. Through this program, you can receive a free, one-hour consultation session with a Claris Partner and get input on ways to streamline processes, introduce efficiencies, and enhance your workplace with modern digital experiences. Sign up today.