Dealerships provide detailing, and other automotive services within their locations. Some do everything in-house, others hire a 3rd-party company like the one that hired me, Dealer General.

Dealer General services over 100 dealership locations in Florida, Georgia, & South Carolina. The way they get paid is per every vehicle processed. To track and manage vehicles processed across 100+ locations Dealer General built an internal app they called Overdrive.

This app ran completely off of a convoluted system based on excel documents in Excel VBA. The one person who knew how to use it suffered of a brain aneurysm, and the company was forced to bring in an outside engineer to learn the system and move it to a modern react app.

That transition was made, and in the process the engineer joins the team, and now wants to redesign the app from scratch to optimize it’s usability. At this point is when I was brought in.

The app never had a proper user experience flow, rather had features pilled on one another. Nothing really made sense and was difficult to navigate. Due to this, employees weren’t always able to successfully process vehicles, often leaving work orders with missing information, and causing the company a loss of revenue.

Goals:

• Help managers add and assign vehicles faster

• Help technicians track their progress faster

Target Users:

• Technicians

• Managers

• General Managers

• Regional Manager

• Corporate Director

Success Metrics:

• User Perception

• User Engagement

• Vehicles Processed

• Realized Revenue

Constraints:

• Over 100 Locations

• Different Services

To fully understand the work, I was brought to a location and presented to the team as a new technician and got to physically detail vehicles and process them through the app.

I met the users organically in their environment and through interviews got first hand experience at user frustrations.

Insights & Analysis:

• Managers were often frustrated adding and assigning vehicles.

• The inventory system was all based around “dealerships.” Some locations have 3 dealerships in one lot, so you have to guess.

• Technicians felt that slowed down by the app and it was affecting their pay

• Technicians feel overall mistrust of management

I talked to the development team daily. I started out by writing out user flows. How does a manager add and assign a new vehicle? How does a technician view vehicles assigned to them and them process them? I would cross reference my flows with not only the dev team but also key employees from the dealership.

Improved vehicle management

Managers can easily add and assign vehicles

Instead of building the data around dealerships, we made vin numbers searchable across the entire database regardless of which dealership it was in. A manager could now find a vehicle in seconds.

Improved work tracking

Technicians can easily document and track their progress.

From their dashboard, a technician see’s exactly where they stand on reaching their goals, and can easily find the next vehicles they need to work on.