Brilliant Application of Software Plus Services in the Irish Motor Industry
CarsNow - Contact Management System for Car Dealerships
Recently I came across a superb example of innovative software built for the Software plus Service model using the Microsoft platform. The application addresses a business need in a high value business which seems to be crying out for attention. CarsNow provides a contact management system for car dealership customers and provides capabilities that the industry has not had access to until now.
Furthermore, CarsNow provides a slick user interface with Silverlight and ASP.Net AJAX and delivers it over the Web using a pure Software as a Service model or using an on-premise model, if desired.
The Business View
Most car dealerships operate a business involving sales of new and used cars, trade-ins and sales of finance to facilitate new purchases. Customers come through the doors of the showroom based on recommendations from friends, in off the street and some bring repeat business since their first ever car purchase. Understanding the different models and nuances is extremely valuable and usually distinguishes excellent sales people from their peers. Capturing a customer’s requirements for a type of car or colour, age as an enquiry is a basic necessity if the garage is to satisfy the customer.
Matching the Customers Needs
In many garages, customers enquire about cars by dropping in or over the phone. Enquiries get logged in the personal diaries of the salespeople and most enquiries get followed up. However, many opportunities are delayed or lost due to poor follow up procedures.
Often there is no car in stock that matches the customer’s requirement (right colour but wrong year, saloon yes but no leather seats). If a used car arrives into stock a week later that matches the customer’s requirements pure luck might kick in and the salesperson just might remember the colour and make the customer wanted. More often the salesperson isn’t even the one bringing in a potential match because his colleague is dealing with the stock intake. After accepting a customer’s enquiry data CarsNow will automatically match those requirements against new stock received by all the sales team in the dealership. This matching can happen on the day or a month later and doesn’t rely on the memory of the sales person.
Integrated Finance and Car Sales
One of the major sources of income in retail car sales comes from selling finance packages for new and used cars. Typically the “Business Manager” looks after arranging the right finance package for the particular car deal.
CarsNow offers a seamless transition from the forecourt and sales floor to the Business Manager’s office by referring the customer details and deal details through to the business manager with a single mouse click. CarsNow has the ability to integrate with several Financial Institutions to get their current best rates for the deal in question so that the business manager can offer the best package to the client. On occasions where even the best rate is not working out for the client the business manager can have the details of the client’s next favourite car.
Business Activity Monitoring – Value in the data
In many cases, understanding the reality of what is going on the shop floor is a blind spot for dealership managers. How many enquiries were not matched with stock? How many used cars are in stock and for how long? By how much is that €100,000 Mercedes depreciating per month? Who is the busiest sales person this morning, in the last hour, over the last month? How many enquiries are being converted to sales? How much stock has a sales person brought in? Can we stop him/her bringing in more stock until the current stock list is reduced? These are questions which are hugely important to the dealer and which the CarsNow system answers in real time.
There is even more value in the enquiry data alone for the manufacturing industry. For examples questions like: Of new car enquiries how many did not materialise because of long lead times from the manufacturer or because the car is not available in silver and leather? How many enquiries resulted in the week following the new advertising campaign?
These questions are also important to dealers but offer even more potential for the manufacturers’ production planning and marketing departments.
Aggregated Data – Centralised in the Cloud – The sum of the parts.....
Keeping all the data centrally provides significant benefits in terms of the manageability of the system, maintaining backups etc but it also means that the data package is not distributed on hard disks through the country/ continent and provides a single holistic source of activity in the industry on a city, county, country. The data is held in SQL Server and can therefore benefit from SQL Server’s Business Intelligence features which will enable executives to discover trends and view the data over geographically over dealerships, city, county, country, region etc. The possibilities are endless.
Populating the greater WEB
When CarsNow captures the used car inventory of the dealership it maintains this data as a master copy for the dealership. Most car dealers have embraced the worldwide Web and will typically go through the tedious process of manually updating several popular car advertising Websites. With CarsNow, once the data is in the system, it can automatically update the popular Websites with the car data and save dealers the tedium of having to manage the data manually.
CarsNow already has the interfaces in production for www.carzone.ie and www.cbg.ie which themselves feed the data on to numerous other Web presences.
Technical Architecture
The figure below shows the various subsystems and flows that make up the CarsNow application. CarsNow is built on Microsoft technology right the way through form the WEB user interface using ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight to the back end database hosted on SQL Server .
Multi-Tenant Data Model
Avida have been absolutely paranoid with respect to privacy of data across dealerships. In general, a tenant of the system is a dealership but there is an added dimension to the hierarchy such that a dealership can spread across more than one location.
Privacy is also enforced between locations of the same dealership (as each may be run as a separate business unit within the group). There are areas where this paranoia is a little relaxed when it comes to reporting across locations in the same dealership. Every record in the database underlying the system is keyed and related to a particular dealership / tenant. Many of the queries on the database use SQL Server 2005 views to extract only the data for the particular dealership.
WEB User Interface
CarsNow uses the latest user interface technologies from Microsoft including ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight. Both ensure that a very slick and high quality user interface is available to users who have no more than a browser to access the system.
Mobile Component
Avida are developing a mobile client component which will be used to record details about the trade in car. Presently an appraisal book is used to record the trade in car details. This book has a diagram of a car and all dents and scratches are recorded on the diagram and notes are taken regarding any necessary repairs. The mobile client will be used to take photos of the car and then allow the salesperson to record on the vehicle the problems with notes by keypad and stylus. This will then synchronise via wireless broadband with the Web app. The pictures taken (were appropriate) will also be used when the car is brought into stock. This will facilitate the quicker turnaround from a car coming into stock to being up on consumer Web sites. By having the car earlier on consumer Web sites, the turnover of stock is increased, stocking charges reduced and as a result higher profitability is possible.
Development Environment
Avida developed CarsNow using Visual Studio 2005 in conjunction with the ASP.NET AJAX add in. The development environment has now been ported to the Visual Studio 2008 RTM (release to manufacture) version.
Moving to Visual Studio 2008 was a straightforward decision as it is the platform of choice for developing ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight applications for developers.
Technologies used include:
· ASP.NET AJAX
· Silverlight 1.0
· .NET 2.0 framework
· MS SQL Server 2005
· Web Server – MS IIS 6.0 (Internet Information Server)
For David Reichental of Avida the reasons for choosing the Microsoft platform were straightforward. “Microsoft offered a tightly integrated development environment that gives developers access to the latest technology standards in the Web arena. Having met some of the leaders of the development and servers tools group at Microsoft I was particularly impressed with the vision for the technology and how Microsoft has taken on board feedback from the IT community”
Silverlight was chosen as the basis for the Rich Media aspects because Avida’s development team are already familiar with the development Microsoft tools for Silverlight. Also, given the roadmap for Silverlight, it is clear that more and more of the .NET functionality will be made available to Silverlight developers through the same (or very similar) APIs and tools that the team use today for .NET development.
Role Base Authorisation
Within CarsNow there are several roles which users may have. There are cars sales people, finance specialists, managers, owners etc. Each user type is presented with the set of screens appropriate to their role. For example, some of the Business Activity Monitor capabilities are only available to managers as they provide a view of sensitive data.
Deployment Options – Software Plus Services
There are a number of ways in which CarsNow can be deployed and made available to dealerships.
Software as a Service (Saas)
The typical installation model for CarsNow is to make use of the CarsNow data centre and have the application code hosted for the dealership. This makes like easier for the dealership who really only to worry about having a browser installed on the PC. According to David Reichental: ”The main reason for choosing the Saas model was that there is practically no deployment effort for a new garage and the same is true when it comes to rolling out upgrades. Customers just get our software upgrades automatically. Some dealerships have very advanced IT and have a server environment for the sales department and for those the on-premise model is an option. However, there are also many cases when the sales people are looking to have a desktop PC. Using the Saas model meant we minimised the deployment hurdle”
On-Premise
The dealership customer base is not only differentiated by the level of their existing IT investments but is also geographically spread. Not all dealerships have access to fast broadband connections so there is also the option of an on-premise server install with CarsNow. It is the same codebase but the system has just one tenant.
