The dealer tech stack in 2026: e-automate, DCAs, CEO Juice, portals

Here’s what ECI documents as the separate pieces of an e-automate dealer’s tech stack: FMAudit for meter collection, the ESN vendor-integration portal, the e-info customer portal, and the MobileTech Dispatch Portal. CEO Juice, a company that operates its own site apart from ECI’s, says it connects remotely into dealers’ e-automate databases and has built a library of rules from problems it has found at the dealerships it works with. This is what each one does, going by what ECI and CEO Juice say about their own products.

What holds it together

ECI’s e-automate help documents call types, the way a service call gets sorted by the kind of problem it is: copy quality, paper jam, power loss. Each call type carries a priority, a category, an activity code, a duration and an icon, so once a dealer assigns one, e-automate can report on how often it shows up.

One mechanism that lets vendor integrations interact with ECI’s ERP software is the Equipment Solutions Network, or ESN. ECI’s installation guide describes ESN as a data portal, with transfers between dealer and vendor bi-directional, 64-bit and blowfish-encrypted, running over TCP (port 9780 recommended). Each vendor is authorized for a specific set of APIs per dealer. ECI separately documents another portal called PIP, which lets a vendor with what ECI calls a “strategic alliance” query or insert data straight into the e-automate database. ECI recommends installing it in a DMZ, on a server running IIS.

FMAudit

A 2021 IT Brief Australia report on an ECI announcement described FMAudit’s software as a “data collection agent,” or DCA. ECI’s e-automate integration guide lays out how it works: once it’s set up, meters collected from customer devices sync into e-automate billing, and dealers can configure alerts to automate the ordering of supplies for managed equipment. The integration guide lists an e-automate user for FMAudit, an FMAudit meter source, custom properties, and a Last FMAudit attribute as setup steps. ECI says the sync itself runs through what it calls the ESN FMAudit sync API, which can update the Last Meters Audit Date in e-automate.

CEO Juice

By its own description, CEO Juice’s virtual team connects remotely into a dealer’s e-automate database and applies a library of rules built from problems it has found at the dealerships it works with, close to 1,000 rules by its own count, tagged by category: contract setup, excessive toner, leases, accounts receivable. One example CEO Juice gives on its site: a drum a manufacturer has guaranteed for 100k pages gets swapped at 30k, and the rule pings the technician and the parts manager and ensures the dealer gets a credit.

Customer and dispatch portals

ECI also documents e-info and the MobileTech Dispatch Portal as portals built for different audiences. By ECI’s own overview, a customer using e-info can check account and equipment information, view service information, place service calls online, submit meter readings, place orders, and pay invoices online. A dispatcher using MobileTech, by ECI’s overview, can view technician information, view customer and technician locations on a map, view service call information, view and export time sheet information, add a time card, and view, edit and report technician data.

Where new tools collide with old ones

A dealer may already be running several products that interact with e-automate, or support workflows next to it, before anyone adds one more. Whether a new tool will collide with the ones already running is one of the first questions IT teams ask us.

Auralis handles meter reads, toner and service calls, and dispatch logging, and writes them into e-automate through its ECI partner integration, via the ESN API.

Before you add one more, The e-automate AI help desk checklist gives you twenty questions to ask any vendor, starting with whether it works inside e-automate or next to it.

Sources

• ECI, e-automate online help (version 250): Creating Call Types, Equipment Solutions Network (ESN) Installation Guide, PIP Installation Guide, Integrating FMAudit with E-automate, E-info Overview, MobileTech Dispatch Portal Overview.
• CEO Juice: Artificial Intelligence, A.I. Processes, About.
• Catherine Knowles, ECI launches new data collection agent for FMAudit, IT Brief Australia, Jan 8, 2021 (reporting ECI’s own announcement).
• Auralis product information (internal).