Pain Point 7 - Time limited dealership employees and poor solutions

Here, we tackle the seventh in our series on dealer pain points - time limited dealership employees and the poor solutions at their fingertips preventing oversight of all systems impacting both efficiency and cost.

Free up time limited employees with integration and automation

Freeing up staff from repetitive manual tasks, often the result of manually papering cracks between disconnected systems, will improve efficiencies and reduce costs in dealerships.

However, grappling with the 300+ applications, which could easily be in operation in a single dealership, is so overwhelming that grasping the technology at work becomes insurmountable.

A simple three-step process helps identify the issues which, in turn, highlights the impact on the business. Starting with an oversight of systems, an audit will pay dividends in the not-too-distant future and the solution is simpler than dealers possibly realise.

Task one - understand your dealership’s and your group’s systems architecture

With so many systems at work in dealerships, it’s difficult to keep track of the extent of applications in operation. Some dealers report as many as 300+ applications undertaking specific daily dealership tasks. Often an employee becomes an expert in one or two systems effectively bridging the gap between disconnected platforms. However, those individuals can be much better deployed in the business if systems are integrated and automation is put in place.

Task two – pinpoint duplications and obsolete licences

The licences required to enable dealership staff to access the various systems are often not tracked and there may even be an excess which is an additional and unnecessary cost. It is also likely that some of the tasks are duplicated across systems and are therefore not necessary.

Task three – implement actionable insights

The most commonplace problems Autofinity has come across are overly complex processes; gaps in processes resulting in key dealer employees papering over the cracks; gaps in data; legacy processes; complexities surrounding mandatory systems which were often not integrated with other third parties or the dealer’s own suppliers; and lack of DMS integrations.

So, what’s the solution?

Autofinity’s consultancy service roadmaps a dealership group’s systems with a visual overview for easy understanding enabling duplications and unnecessary applications to be identified. Experts undertake a systems audit to optimise the data collated from unconnected platforms as well as providing advice on those which best suit dealer requirements. The audit provides dealers with a definitive guide to optimising data flow through system integration.

That sounds disruptive and time consuming

Transform Consulting’s audit is non-intrusive and requires less input than dealers typically imagine yet the results are transformative.

Experienced and knowledgeable consultants work through a group’s system architecture and produce clear, detailed mapping of systems and processes. With little impact on internal staff, Transform Consultancy does the heavy lifting and enables dealers to make informed decisions on changes needed.

Once the consultation has taken place, dealer groups can easily apply Autofinity’s suite of products, which has ViHUB at its core and creates a single view of each vehicle in group stock. Utilising this ‘single source of truth’ ensures an update made in one place, such as a change of sale price, populates all integrated systems. With changes applied incrementally if required, the solution and its delivery is tailormade to each group.

Implementing Autofinity’s platform provides oversight of the entire vehicle stock management process and vehicle marketing freeing up employees’ time to focus on more complex and engaging tasks.