Industries / Automotive dealers and service
The DMS knows the repair order. The CRM knows the lead, the scheduler knows the appointment, and the phone at eight in the morning knows nothing at all. We build the layer that reads all of them, answers the routine calls, and puts one number in front of the owner.
How it actually runs
No software can be scoped from a category name. These are the specifics of automotive dealers and service that decide what is worth building and what is not.
Doors open and the service drive fills. Three advisors are writing up the cars standing in front of them, so the calls stack up behind. A customer asking whether their part came in gets voicemail, and most of them do not leave one. By ten the queue has cleared and nobody knows how many people gave up and rang the shop down the road.
The DMS holds the repair order. The CRM holds the lead from the website. The scheduler holds the appointment, the marketing tool holds the email address, and the accounting package holds the payment. The same person exists in all five with a different spelling and two phone numbers. When the owner asks how many customers the store actually has, five answers come back.
A warranty claim lives or dies on what the advisor typed at seven in the morning. Miss the complaint, cause and correction wording, the technician code or the mileage, and the manufacturer rejects it or claws it back at audit. The rejection arrives weeks later on a statement, long after the technician has been paid and the car has gone home.
A trade comes in. It waits for a detail bay, then for a safety inspection, then for a part nobody ordered on the day it arrived. Each hand-off is a text message. The used vehicle manager knows the car is late but not which stage ate the week, and every extra day is depreciation the store pays for quietly.
The inspection finds four items. The customer approves one and declines three because of the bill that month. Those three lines sit inside a closed repair order, and nothing brings them back. Six weeks later the same customer books the same job at a tyre shop, and the store never learns it lost work it had already found.
Where it leaks
The free audit prices these in your own numbers before anything is scoped. You keep the map whether or not you hire us.
| The leak | How it is measured today | What closes it |
|---|---|---|
| Calls that hit voicemail during the morning write-up rush. | Not measured. The phone system logs exist and nobody opens them. | A voice agent answers every call and logs what it could not resolve. |
| Declined inspection items nobody ever calls back about. | It sits inside a closed repair order and is never counted. | A nightly read of declined lines and a follow-up an advisor approves. |
| Warranty claims rejected for a field missed at write-up. | Found on the manufacturer statement weeks after the car left. | A check at write-up that flags missing fields before the order closes. |
| Used units stalled in reconditioning with no owner. | A whiteboard in the back office and somebody's memory. | Stage timestamps end to end, with one alert when a car stops moving. |
What we build
Each one states what it reads, what it does, and what a person still approves. Scope is agreed after the audit, one build at a time, against a baseline you sign.
The agent answers every call, including the ones during the morning rush. It reads the scheduler and repair order status, so it can book an appointment, confirm a part has landed, quote posted menu pricing and say when a car is ready. Anything else transfers to an advisor with the caller's name, vehicle and reason already on screen.
Measured by: Share of inbound calls answered inside three rings.
It answers what the email queue is full of: opening hours, what a scheduled service covers, whether a recall applies to a given VIN, loaner and shuttle rules, tyre storage, and what to bring to an appointment. It reads the store's own published policies rather than guessing. Anything about a price or a diagnosis goes to a person.
Measured by: Front desk emails and calls handled per week.
We read the DMS, the CRM, the scheduler and the marketing list into one shape, match records on name, phone, email and VIN, and score every match for confidence. Weak joins stay visible instead of being merged quietly. A person reviews anything below the threshold before two records become one, and nothing is deleted from the source systems.
Measured by: Duplicate customer records left in the merged set.
A nightly job reads closed repair orders for declined inspection lines, checks the vehicle has not since had the work done elsewhere in the group, and builds a follow-up list by job and by how long it has waited. The advisor sees the car, the item, the original estimate and the date, and approves the message before it sends.
Measured by: Dollars of declined work recovered each month.
Every used unit is stamped at each stage: arrival, appraisal, mechanical, body, detail, photos, listed. The stamps come from the shop system and a scan on a phone rather than a whiteboard. When a car sits longer than the rule for that stage, the manager gets one alert naming the car and the stage. Priority changes stay with the manager.
Measured by: Average days from trade acceptance to front line.
One page each morning: repair orders written, hours sold per technician, effective labour rate, parts on back order, aged used units and calls answered. Every figure links back to the record it came from, so a number that looks wrong gets opened rather than argued about. Nothing is estimated, and if a source failed to load the report says so.
Measured by: Minutes spent building the Monday numbers by hand.
The numbers
None of these are our results. They are the published state of automotive dealers and service, linked so you can check them, with the caveat attached where the number is a survey, a forecast or a vendor's own figure.
More than half of Canadian dealers name integration between their systems as a problem, and many run twenty or more systems with overlapping functions.
Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, reported by Canadian Auto Dealer, 2025Self-reported survey of about 550 dealer principals and managers, commissioned by CADA and conducted by Clarify Group. It reports opinion, not audited system counts.
Federal projections put automotive service technicians at moderate risk of shortage, with job openings running slightly ahead of job seekers for a decade.
Employment and Social Development Canada, Canadian Occupational Projection System, 2024A projection covering 2024 to 2033, not a count of current vacancies. It is a national figure and the picture differs by province.
Ontario's dealer regulator laid thousands of charges in a single year, and enforcement against registrants rose sharply.
Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council, 2025Ontario only, and it counts charges laid rather than convictions. Other provinces are regulated separately and publish differently.
Where the data comes from
We read them, we do not replace them. Each one below says what we connect to, how, and the line the build does not cross.
Usually: PBS Systems, Serti, CDK Global, Reynolds and Reynolds, Quorum XSELLERATOR, Tekion, Dealertrack DMS
What it holds. Repair orders, technician time and flat rate hours, parts stock and orders, deal jackets, warranty claims, and the general ledger the accountant signs.
How we connect. Vendor API where the DMS opens one. Where it does not, a scheduled export or a read-only replica we build against, refreshed nightly.
Where it stops. Nothing we build posts, closes or edits a repair order, a claim or a ledger entry. The DMS stays the system of record and a person does the writing.
Usually: VinSolutions, Activix, DealerSocket, Elead, Xtime, Dealer-FX, Kimoby, myKaarma
What it holds. Leads, appointment slots and shop capacity, the message log with each customer, inspection results and the video the technician recorded.
How we connect. API for reads, plus a webhook on appointment created and appointment changed so the voice agent and the reports are never working from last night's copy.
Where it stops. No booking lands in a technician's bay outside the dispatch rules the shop foreman set. Capacity changes stay with the person who owns the schedule.
Usually: Protractor, Mitchell 1 Manager SE, Tekmetric, Shop-Ware, NAPA TRACS, Lankar, with QuickBooks or Sage behind them
What it holds. Estimates and repair orders, the parts catalogue and supplier pricing, labour times, technician efficiency, payables and receivables.
How we connect. Scheduled export or a read-only replica, matched against the parts catalogue so a variance points at a part number rather than a hunch.
Where it stops. We never place a parts order or change a sell price automatically. The system flags the shortfall and a person orders.
Built around your rules
Constraints come first, because they decide the architecture. Bring us your hosting, residency and regulatory rules at the start and we design to them rather than around them.
| Regime | What it demands here | How the build complies |
|---|---|---|
| PIPEDA, with BC PIPA, Alberta PIPA and Quebec Law 25 | Collect only what the job needs, say why you are collecting it, keep it secure and hand it over when the customer asks. Quebec adds transparency duties where a decision about a person is made by automated means. | Customer data stays in Canada where that is the requirement. Each build takes the fields it needs and no more, every read and write is logged, and no automated output affects a customer until a named person approves it. |
| CASL | Every commercial electronic message needs consent, clear sender identification and a working unsubscribe. A purchase or a paid repair gives implied consent for a limited window, and that window expires. | Consent basis and its expiry date sit on the customer record. The follow-up builder excludes anyone without a valid basis, stamps identification and unsubscribe into every send, and an advisor approves the list before it goes. |
| Provincial dealer regulators: OMVIC in Ontario, the Vehicle Sales Authority in British Columbia, AMVIC in Alberta | Registration of the dealership and its salespeople, all-in price advertising, and disclosure of a vehicle's history and material condition before the customer commits. | An advertised price is assembled from one priced record, so the figure on the website is the figure in the deal. Disclosure fields are mandatory on a listing and nothing publishes with them empty. |
| PCI-DSS | Card data must not be stored or handled outside a compliant environment. That covers the cashier terminal, any pay-by-text link and the tablet on the service drive. | We do not touch card numbers. Payment stays inside the processor the store already uses, and our systems hold a payment reference and a status, nothing more. |
Anything that spends money, sends something irreversible, or carries a professional obligation arrives as a draft with a named reviewer. The system prepares the work. A person decides whether it ships.
You own the code and the data at the end of the engagement.
Questions
No. The DMS stays where it is and keeps being the system of record. We read from it through a vendor API where one exists, and a scheduled export or a read-only replica where it does not. Nothing we build posts a repair order, closes a warranty claim or touches an accounting entry. The store keeps the system its staff already know.
It only handles what it can finish: hours, booking, part arrival, status, directions. It says what it is at the start of the call. Anything it cannot resolve transfers to an advisor with the caller's details already on screen, so nobody repeats themselves. If a caller describes a safety fault it hands over immediately rather than trying.
It is the first job, not a blocker. Reading the sources into one shape, matching records across them and scoring the weak joins is most of the work on any of these builds. The free audit counts your duplicates against your own data before anything is agreed, and you keep that map whether or not you hire us.
In Canada, when that is the requirement. Canadian hosting is a constraint we settle before the first line of code rather than patch in afterwards, so customer records, VINs and finance data stay on Canadian infrastructure. If your manufacturer agreement or your own policy is stricter, that becomes the rule the build is designed to, and we tell you where every vendor sits before we connect it.
What happens next
Three to five days. We map where the hours and the money go in your automotive dealers and service operation and hand you a ranked plan with the payback attached.
We map where time and money leak, and show the arithmetic before you commit to anything. You keep the map whether or not you hire us. If we do build, we agree the baseline in writing first, the clock starts at deployment rather than signature, and you own the code.
