Karmak and the Fortune Hiding Between Repairs

The expensive part of a truck repair is not always the repair. Sometimes it is the interval afterward: a technician has finished one job and is waiting to discover the next. The tools are ready. The person is ready. The information, meanwhile, has elected to travel by paperwork.

At TCI Transportation, that interval could reach 45 minutes. After the company introduced Karmak Mobile Service, a published case study put it at five. A mechanic had acquired another 40 minutes without acquiring another arm. This is a pleasingly unglamorous place to find a software business: in the gap between knowing something and getting it to the person who needs it.

A parts counter with a software problem

Karmak began with a man who knew exactly what was wrong with inventory software because he had inventory to manage. Richard Schien ran the parts department at Schien Body & Equipment in Carlinville, Illinois. The family business had progressed from welding to dump bodies to heavy-duty truck parts. By the 1970s, its stockroom needed a system that understood how a parts department actually worked.

Schien worked with Alan Weller on software that became Legend. Karmak dates that effort to 1974 and its incorporation to December 31, 1981. The early software had been built for use in the family operation; demand from outside it created a company. The founding philosophy was to treat people “fair and a little bit more.” A modest sentence, with considerably more obligations than a glossy mission poster.

The present-day customer might sell trucks, repair trailers, distribute parts, or manage lease and rental units. These businesses contain several operations under one roof. A repair consumes a part, occupies a technician, changes a vehicle’s history, and creates a financial transaction. If each department maintains its own version of the event, the business acquires a small committee devoted to correcting the others.

Karmak’s parts tools distinguish available inventory from committed stock, purchases on order, and backorders. Staff can check another branch, put a part onto a repair order, and apply customer-specific pricing. Core and exchange handling is included, too. These distinctions are easy to overlook from a software conference stage. At a counter, they determine whether a promise to a customer is true.

The financial side is equally particular. Operational transactions feed accounting, with accounts payable, receivables, audit history, and permissions alongside the general ledger. The attraction is a record that departments can share. That gives a controller fewer opportunities to discover, at month-end, that the parts counter and the books have been living separate lives.

The money between jobs

TCI already had Karmak Fusion. Its problem was the work surrounding repair work. Paper forms required interpretation and later entry into the system. Karmak’s account of the project describes disputes over what those forms meant. Information written after a job, then interpreted by someone else, has plenty of room to acquire a personality.

The intervention was specific: add Mobile Service to the existing system and let technicians update repair orders where the work happened. They could type or dictate information on a mobile device. The project moved recordkeeping closer to the event it described and made the next assignment easier to reach.

Nucleus Research’s February 2025 study reported ten hours of manual data-entry work saved per week at each of TCI’s 26 locations, more than $500,000 in combined annual savings, a 201% return on investment, and recovery of the investment in six months. Those figures concern this deployment, on top of Fusion. They deserve the specificity; a case study loses its usefulness when it is promoted into a universal law.

There were unfinished jobs on the software side, too. The case study’s lessons discussed TCI’s desire for deeper reporting, including better views of job-completion time. An early adopter can gain useful capacity while still keeping a list of requests. That is a more credible account of implementation than the ceremonial claim that everything was transformed on Tuesday.

Two engines, one customer conversation

Fusion, introduced in 2011, is Karmak’s established platform for organizations requiring configurable workflows and financial controls. It brings the principal departments together and has mobile extensions. Karmak also offers Xcelerate managed hosting. Hosted Fusion and a browser-based product are different propositions, even if both involve someone else’s computers.

The browser-based proposition is Blaze. It entered Karmak’s portfolio through the acquisition of longtime competitor DSI Solutions, effective September 30, 2025. The purchase added more than 700 account locations, according to the announcement. Karmak said both systems would remain available and supported. Blaze gives the company an option for buyers who put a premium on mobile access and a lighter infrastructure burden.

Truckmore handles the customer-facing relationship: service requests, updates, approvals, promotions, and loyalty. It carries the dealer’s brand and can work with other dealer management systems. That matters because a fleet customer’s next action may be approving a repair, while the dealer’s next action is managing a technician. Putting both people in the same internal interface would confuse two quite different jobs.

Connections to manufacturers and outside tools are central to this market. Karmak’s integration directory lists more than 75 partners, including OEM connections for DTNA, PACCAR, International, and Mack/Volvo. Its 2025 BlueTread partnership targeted connected service scheduling. A dealer should inspect the actual workflow supported by an integration; a familiar logo alone cannot submit a warranty claim.

Karmak competes in a specialist market. Procede’s Excede also serves truck, trailer, bus, and aftermarket businesses. Industry focus is therefore a reason to consider Karmak, not proof that alternatives lack it. Karmak’s particular combination is its parts-counter lineage, employee ownership, two core platforms, customer apps, and accompanying services.

The company had to repair itself, too

The tidy founding story has a less tidy middle. Trade reporting in 2024 described a difficult period followed by a leadership change in 2021 and a renewed emphasis on customer experience. Advisory panels and customer polling helped guide development priorities. John Cowan, then vice president of Business Solutions, put it plainly: “I think our mentality has changed.”

“We win when they win.”

John Cowan / speaking to Trucks, Parts, Service, 2024

The ownership transition supplied a concrete change in incentives. Karmak began its employee stock ownership plan in 2003. In 2022, the plan acquired the remaining shares and the company became 100% employee-owned. That makes the people serving customers participants in the business’s long-term value. It does not make every support interaction perfect; it makes ownership less abstract.

The company’s current work includes education as well as code. A 2026 Parts Road Show at Automann’s Duncanville facility gave customers a day to examine inventory, purchasing, and pricing with Karmak staff and partners. The point was to put existing capabilities to better use. Features that nobody uses have an unusually low return, whatever their prospects looked like in the demo.

Start with the handoff

The buying process should begin with a repair order, not a feature checklist. Ask the team to follow one job from intake to invoice. Count the repeated entries, the calls to locate a part, and the minutes spent waiting for an assignment or approval. Then ask a vendor to demonstrate that same job, with your permissions and manufacturer requirements.

Karmak’s business model combines business software with implementation, training, consulting, reporting, and hosting services. Its custom training is scoped around user roles and actual workflows. A useful quote should distinguish the software from migration, integrations, hosting, and staff time. Six-month payback in TCI’s case is evidence of a result; it is not a price for a new dealership installation.

The limits follow from the mechanism. A shop that already captures repair data once and assigns jobs immediately has less of this particular waste to remove. Poor records, unused mobile tools, or an integration that misses a necessary OEM workflow can also undermine the result. Those are evaluation questions, not reasons to admire or dismiss a logo.

Karmak’s oldest lesson is still its most portable. Stand where the transaction happens. Watch what people have to remember, repeat, and wait for. Somewhere between the finished repair and the next instruction, a perfectly capable business may be paying good people to wait.