All the phone calls, emails, and chasing people down to get a car from the front line to the sales floor just got much easier for car dealers thanks to Rapid Recon, a cloud-based process management company from Palo Alto, California.
"The whole thing about the market now is velocity," Steve Lewis, vice president of sales and marketing, told Mega Dealer News. "Get the car, retail it, get the gross in the first 20 to 30 days. That's the formula."
What Rapid Recon does is help dealers get cars from acquisition to the front line as quickly as possible. For example, if a dealership has 20 days to get the most gross profit on a car and they're taking 12 days to get the car to the front line, they're leaving their sales team only eight days to maximize their margins.
"We take dealers from an average of 10 to 12 days -- our highest is around 18 days -- and work that down to three to five days," Lewis said. "It takes a lot of modern technology. Our best dealers are getting approvals in two to five minutes when the average is about two and a half days."
This system cuts out waste, identifies bottlenecks and puts all communication on a cloud-based platform for everyone to access.
"Instead of all of the departments acting as silos, every bit of information all comes in with complete transparency," Lewis said.
Company analysis found that getting cars to lot three days faster, measured in Average Days of Recon, can increase a dealership's gross sales by $291,951.
"Even if we shave one day off on 2,000 cars, that's a serious return," Lewis said.
Currently, Rapid Recon is working with big name dealers like Penske, Hendricks, and Larry Miller.
"We pretty much own this market. No one was in this market before we came into it," Lewis said.
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