Seven years ago, Del Grande Dealer Group was as far away from digitized as possible. Daily sales numbers, old automaker statements, payroll, inventory reporting and pricing mechanisms for new and used cars were mostly compiled by hand, recalled CEO Jeremy Beaver.
“We felt like there were a lot of inefficiencies in data integration,” Beaver told Automotive News. “It would take hours to calculate a spreadsheet and send it out to the organization.”
Beaver hired Jagdish Rajan to help solve the problem. As Del Grande’s first-ever chief technology officer, he was charged with modernizing how the group gathered and used its data to make daily operations and processes more efficient. That mission has succeeded on multiple levels, Beaver said, thanks to Rajan and his team’s creation of what’s known as a data lake — a virtual repository that holds massive amounts of data from multiple sources in the organization, which has stores across Northern California.
Using that massive data source (filled in part with data supplied by dealership management system company CDK Global), Rajan and his now nine-person information technology team — composed of a project manager, product manager, user experience/user interface designer and six offshore developers — have come up with technology to help eliminate time-consuming steps in both back office and front office functions. That has reaped benefits, from more efficient sale lead generation to tools that Del Grande hopes to monetize with other dealerships and partners in the future, Beaver said.
“From a productivity standpoint … people now can see all of the data real time on where productivity lies, and that, again, is in every facet of our business, anything from head count, productivity to product sold, to finance reporting, to technician efficiency,” Beaver said.
That lets employees adjust practices quickly.
“There are a lot of performance-driven metrics,” he said.
The technology team developed a number of software tools for Del Grande, a 1,100-employee company that touts a projected $1.6 billion in sales for 2023 and is on track this year to sell 18,000 new and 12,000 used vehicles. The San Jose, Calif., group ranks No. 60 on Automotive News‘ list of the top 150 dealership groups based in the U.S., retailing 13,853 new vehicles in 2022.
One in-house software tool uses automation to help Del Grande buy more than 100 vehicles per month from private parties, Beaver said. Another helps the group operate with lower selling, general and administrative expenses because it can use data aggregation instead of paying for third-party platforms.
Still more software tools created automated or streamlined workflows for a used-car reconditioning process, payroll and bonus calculations as well as collections from banks and individuals on vehicle sales contracts.
Combined, these have led to undisclosed weekly cost savings and more efficient compliance efforts, according to Rajan and Beaver.
Having a streamlined platform enabling the use of automated data has come in handy, Beaver said, particularly during the group’s purchase of three dealerships since the beginning of 2022.
“We now have the ability to go and drop in our technology essentially overnight,” Beaver said. Previously, “a new store would have a new process. They would want to use something different. All of our vendors, all of our partners are all part of our platform, and so it really becomes a unified approach for the entire operation, that we’re all using the same systems.”
Very few dealerships or groups have a top technology officer, Beaver said, and they don’t necessarily need one. But having one has enabled Del Grande to focus heavily on technology to make the group run smoother from top to bottom, he said.
“We do know that the utilization of technology in any business can help create efficiency, and so each dealership or dealer group needs to figure out in the future … how they can continue to maximize the use of systems and processes that can help them be more efficient every day,” Beaver said.
