Optimum Info: Fostering Automotive Manufacturer and Dealer Collaboration for Better Outcomes

Arvind Verma, President & CEO

With the world moving at a faster pace, organizations should be flexible enough to tap into all the opportunities of the digital world; however, when it comes to the automotive industry, many solutions are still inflexible and unable to catch up with the current digital landscape. For instance, in the Business Management area some automotive companies are struggling to measure the financial health and performance of their dealer network including return on sales, service absorption, departmental gross profit, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Even for small enhancements in solutions, it is expensive and time-consuming. So what solution should automotive companies employ to adapt to the changing needs of the market? This is where Optimum Info comes to the rescue. By blending both business and technical competence, the firm provides flexible, user-centric solutions that develop and improve the overall effectiveness of automotive companies to measure and improve the performance of their franchise network.

In this interview, Arvind Verma, President and CEO shares some valuable insights about his organization and the features and functionality of their offering in the network development area which empowers automotive companies to make better decisions and drive superior dealer performance.

Can you give a detailed description of your network development solutions?

Initially, we started with Business Management Solution and with growing needs we developed other solutions in the network area that include Dealer Contact Management System, Dealer Package Management System, and Facility Project Tracking System.

Business Management Solution helps the clients in measuring the financial and operational performance of the dealers relative to their peers. For instance, if you are a dealer in LA, how will you perform when compared with other dealers in that location and identify the areas of improvement? Additionally, our system includes a fully integrated Planning and Variance Reporting module and is also equipped with a powerful set of features that allows the corporate personnel, field managers and dealerships to receive, validate and process dealer financial data as well as operational data providing complete visibility.

Dealer Contact Management System helps the field managers to manage all the aspects of dealer contact meetings and related collaboration. This includes scheduling, preparing, and recording dealership meetings, tracking actionable items and more. It basically ensures that the meetings are well documented, and it also improves the relationship between the field managers and the dealership.

Dealer Package Management System (DPMS) helps in the complete life cycle of the dealer documentation and packages.

It covers documentation requirements, electronic communication to dealers, dealer package preparation, dealer document submission, online review, collaboration and approval, dealer agreements and electronic signature.

We embark our journey together with our clients and continuously grow and enhance our product without creating any artificial barrier of an inflexible system

Lastly, our Facility Project Management System (FPMS) is a network development solution that eases the process of managing and tracking facility projects. This system records and manages stakeholder collaboration, document management, milestone management, facility pictures, project tracking,and reporting.

Could you talk about the differentiating factor that highlights your company from the rest of your competitors?

In the midst of companies that offer fairly limited solutions, we implement and develop solutions based on a much broader vision. For instance, our business management solution is not only for collecting data and generating standard reports, but it also acts as a comprehensive analytics platform where there are additional tools like risk modeling, statistical tools, scorecard concept and more. Also, we often notice when we onboard a client, within a short time we are seeing a lot of client ideas on how we can help improve the quality and effectiveness of their work. We address many of their requirements and also as our solution is a monthly subscription model we do not charge additionally for ideas for improvement. With us, the clients are no longer locked into a single version which does not provide updates on a regular basis. So basically, we embark our journey together with our clients and continuously grow and enhance our product without creating any artificial barrier of an inflexible system.

Could you mention some of your clients? Please elaborate on a use case where you have helped a client

Some of our clients in this area include Kia, Mazda, Kawasaki, Porsche, Hyundai, Nissan, Volvo, Ducati and more. For the Powersports study, I like to mention one of our customers that was in need of a solution to effectively manage their dealership visits and contact. This is because the field managers were not keeping track of their dealership visits, which includes prioritizing the discussion topics of dealers and documenting it. With these documents, the field managers can review the past action items and plan for new visits defining specific areas of improvement. So without a proper record of the dealership visits, this organization was taking about two and a half hours to prepare for a contact meeting. In a month every individual Field Manager meets at least 15 dealers and preparing contact reports for each dealership visit was taking a lot of time. So when we addressed this issue with our Dealer Contact Management System, we helped reduced the preparation time to just about 15 minutes. This almost saved 80 percent of time per dealer for the dealership visit preparation. Additionally, our solution also provides a calendar invite with which the manufacturers can schedule meetings with the dealers for every dealership visit. So with our solution, we not only managed to reduce the preparation time we also made sure that every contact meeting is documented, recorded, and viewed by the management providing greater transparency.

What is next for Optimum Info?

As we are working on multiple dimensions, our next step is based on three dimensions—territory, market segment, and the product side.

We have already established our product in the USA and are expanding in Canada and Mexico and we are continuously receiving a good amount of interest from Europe. Even in U.K., I did a presentation in one of the automotive companies where we received very positive responses. In the next 18 months we are planning to expand our presence in Europe, and parallelly we are also planning to have a presence in China.

On the marketing side, we want our company to expand beyond the automotive industry to similar industries such as Powersports, Transportation and Equipment sectors and more where we can sell our products in a subscription model. Being in the industry for years, we gained a lot of knowledge from the automotive industry, and we want to bring that same knowledge to other industry as well.