Digital Transformation for one of UK’s largest Motor Retailers

Our client, part of the Constellation Automotive Group, had experienced rapid growth in recent years due to its continued success. Its federated model and fast growth had been effective in achieving year-on-year business growth; however it had also led to increased variation and inconsistency across its operating units, unnecessary overheads due to diseconomies of scale, and increased operational complexity. Many of its processes were manual and onerous, requiring increased resources to resolve process-wastes including errors, delays and over-processing. These inefficiencies had financial and people impacts, including impacts to employee morale and productivity, and increased compliance risks.

Our client is committed to retailing excellence through focusing on customer service and its people. The Group aims to continue its growth journey, both organically and through acquisitions, whilst also building scale with its existing brand partners and extending its geographic footprint. In order to enable this strategy, it was essential to assess internal processes and ways of working to achieve improved efficiency and standardisation.

To help understand the current situation, we mapped the ‘as-is’ business processes across a number of geographical and manufacturer diverse car dealership sites. These were combined into value stream maps which identified 93 individual opportunities which could deliver benefits.

The potential benefits were reviewed to understand where the biggest impact could be made and a decision was made to focus on the standardisation of documents required during the purchase and selling of vehicles. In addition, to aligning the business process, the paper-based filing system was to be replaced with a digital storage solution.

We agreed exactly which documents should be included as standard within a Deal File and identified any documents which were unique to a brand or manufacturer. We worked alongside the system provider to configure the system to store the documents and set up a workflow which reflected the business process steps. We undertook a trial for Mercedes Benz and BMW dealerships in the South of England to demonstrate proof of concept.

Benefits included:

• Alignment to a single business process for purchasing and selling of vehicles
• Reduction in process cycle time and improved efficiency as a result of simplified, standardised processes – several hours saved per car sale transaction
• Improved productivity – volume of transactions processed per person per day increased by over 10%
• Reduction in printing and storage costs (over £10k saving p/a)
• Transparency across the dealership and group network
• Ability to undertake compliance audits remotely
• Software cost savings (over £20k p/a)
• Improved customer experience