Speeds Vehicle Reconditioning and Boosts Back-Office Analytics; Automates 70% of Recon Activities
- Dramatically reduces reconditioning time – increases vehicle time to market by up to 20% and decreases recon staff workloads by up to 70%.
- Industry’s first real time location platform pinpoints exact locations of every car and key in fleet.
- Easily and cost-effectively customizable to support existing dealer operations, key locker & back office systems.
TrueSpot, a new Internet of Things (IOT) asset location platform developer recently announced the commercial launch of TrueRecon. The new technology was developed to better manage automotive dealership inventory and accelerate the speed of costly, highly dispersed auto reconditioning (recon) processes by an estimated 15-20%.
Auto dealers coordinate multiple phases of servicing to prepare vehicles for sale, often including 10-20 tasks across numerous departments and locations – both on and off the lot. These activities may include upholstery repairs, tire replacement/alignment, body work, paint, detailing and more. TrueSpot is the industry’s first solution that pinpoints the exact location of vehicles and keys throughout this process. Additionally, the system integrates dealer back-office data to streamline workflows and Lot Management 360 (digitizing the dealership).
“Our platform basically puts vehicle recon on ‘autopilot,’ said TrueSpot CEO Mike Hanna. “TrueSpot geo-automates complex reconditioning tasks. It saves hours of staff time by eliminating the need for each department to manually call, schedule and transfer a vehicle for the next recon activity. It also alerts management when a vehicle falls overdue for a task, tracks and certifies all renovations and provides much more accurate analytical information for management.”
TrueSpot estimates dealers spend around $42 per day for each day a vehicle is in recon. Large dealerships can have hundreds of cars in recon at any given time. This has created an environment vulnerable for the misplacement of ever-moving keys and vehicles. As a result, auto dealers can spend more than $10,000 per month to replace lost vehicle keys and waste even more in the hours of productive employee time tracking down inventory.
The TrueSpot solution is comprised of proprietary wireless locator tags that can be placed inside vehicles and attached to keys and other assets. Combined with a low powered enterprise campus network and applications for Apple and Android wireless devices, dealerships can instantly locate these assets and identify their recon status.
“Cars and keys move around the dealer campus constantly, especially during the recon process,” Hanna said. “Keys are being handed off from person to person and department to department – on and off the dealership lot, and can easily get dropped in a pocket, a desk drawer or file folder and forgotten. It’s a significant problem across the industry.”
The start-up is raising $1 million in investment capital, which would add to the more than $700,000 it’s already raised; and is projecting to acquire 30 to 40 new dealer clients within the next nine months – up from around a dozen currently.
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