OPENLANE Revs Up App Development in the Cloud, Sees 50% Reduction in Time and Cost

Challenge

• OPENLANE, the leading online wholesale automotive auction company in North America has experienced significant growth in its business over the past few years – including increasing the number of dealers, the amount of consignor inventory and the overall transactions on the many sites the company operates.
• OPENLANE initially used an on-premise CRM solution to manage customer interactions and felt limited by the lack of functionality and an inability to configure and customize the on-premise system to meet the unique needs of its business.
• OPENLANE also found it expensive to integrate its on-premise platform with existing systems; integration development and maintenance required a lot of custom work and time.
• Given its rapid growth, OPENLANE wanted to expand its customer and partner management solution to incorporate other processes that touch dealers in order to increase responsiveness and service levels. The company needed a platform it could customize to support unique business processes such as vehicle arbitrations, collections, and customer inquiries in order to facilitate customer requests.
• The company wanted a consolidated view of dealer and partner information captured in multiple systems across the organization including its industry leading auction platforms, SAP and their enterprise data warehouse.
• OPENLANE also wanted to be able to add capabilities developed by 3rd parties in order to be able to leverage the development efforts of other organizations. Email marketing was an initial area of focus.
• OPENLANE wanted to give customers a direct view of data and actions.

Solution

• OPENLANE considered solutions from other vendors, but selected salesforce.com’s Unlimited Edition cloud computing platform for its functionality, ease of customization, and large number of compatible third-party applications available on the AppExchange.
• OPENLANE initially customized and configured salesforce.com to manage dealer interactions and then began to add custom components to leverage the initial investment and deliver even higher levels of service to dealers and partners.
• The company built a homegrown middleware solution using Java for bi-directional integration between salesforce.com and its enterprise data warehouse which aggregates all data across multiple systems.
• With help from Salesforce.com Professional Services, OPENLANE built an application on Force.com to manage all information related to vehicle arbitrations. The development time was less than half the estimate of building the solution with an on premise solution since existing data in Salesforce could be leveraged by the arbitration module. Partnering with salesforce.com Professional Services allowed OPENLANE to keep its internal development teams focused on key projects related to its industry leading online auction platforms.
• After observing how easy it was to build out an arbitrations module using Force.com, OPENLANE developed a collections module that allows customer facing employees to get visibility into SAP financials from salesforce.com. Workflow was heavily used to automate the process and enforce best practices. Workflows automatically assign accounts to collections or sales employees depending on how long a bill has gone unpaid. OPENLANE is also planning to give 3rd parties, such as auction insurance companies, access to the collections data located in salesforce.com once the collections effort gets escalated to a certain level.
• OPENLANE has also implemented the salesforce.com customer portal to allow dealers to log inquiries with respect to Post Sales processes such as: arbitrations, transportation, payment status, title status and more. This portal provides 24x7 self-service for dealers. OPENLANE also uses the ideas feature within the portal to collect feedback from dealers and provides a document repository in the customer portal.
• OPENLANE integrated salesforce.com with its proprietary industry leading online auction engine to bring auction data into salesforce.com. Now Dealer Sales representatives can track vehicles at auction, bids, sessions, purchases and related post sales information in salesforce.com such as when a car title was mailed and the delivery tracking number.
• The company uses the AppExchange to broaden its solution further. For example, OPENLANE is using VerticalResponse to streamline email communications with dealers. OPENLANE is also using MapQuest and Plurapage applications in their salesforce.com instance.

Results

• OPENLANE views Force.com as a key differentiator for its business. Force.com provides a flexible platform for this growing company to consistently expand and leverage their CRM implementation and deepen their relationships with dealers and partners.
• By leveraging its existing implementation and building its arbitration application on Force.com instead of Java, OPENLANE reduced development time by 50%. Quick and easy development on the salesforce.com platform allows OPENLANE Engineering resources to remain focused on revenue-generating projects such as the development of the company’s core auction sites.
• Force.com has become the system of record at OPENLANE for information on every dealer transaction; employees now have a 360-degree view of the business and consequently are able to respond to and serve customers more quickly and easily. The OPENLANE sales team is able effectively focus on pre-sale tasks and the Operations team is able to efficiently process post-sale transactions.
• Dealers and partners have a seamless experience with OPENLANE and have immediate visibility into their auction site transactions and post sales activities.