Fast, Automated Databases for an Automotive Consultant

Challenge

Kevin Fitchner, a 40-year automotive executive and consultant to Lease Tag and Mercedes of Santa Rosa, was spending too much time manually uploading his inventory data into Excel spreadsheets. He knew the busy salespeople he worked with didn’t always have time to create and print out the most updated sales tag for every car to show potential customers how affordable leasing can be.

Kevin needed a quicker, more automated way to input and compare incentives, rates and residual databases against current inventory across several dealerships. Using Excel spreadsheets was not only painfully slow, but inconsistent. As his data changed, his spreadsheets were unable to automatically adapt.

Solution

Kevin researched solutions online and talked to a lot of different vendors. After learning about Kintone, Kevin decided to email a sample Excel spreadsheet to a sales engineer to see how it could be transformed into a mobile and collaborative business app.

“Kintone took my project seriously,” Kevin said. “The sales team made it very simple for me to finetune my spreadsheet and gave me a timeline that was to the day spot on. Within a month of contacting Kintone, I had a working application.”

How Lease Tag uses Kintone:

1. Import inventory data from spreadsheet into custom Kintone app
2. Use data to calculate lease rates.
3. In one click, batch print hundreds of formatted lease tags using Kintone’s Print Creator plugin.

We have something that’s bullet-proof.

Results

Since deploying Kintone, Kevin has already saved money by giving his dealerships the tools to avoid costly spreadsheet mistakes. Kintone takes efficiency a step further for Kevin with its built-in print creator feature to allow salespeople to bulk print lease tags with automatic calculations.

“What used to take us two days, takes a half hour,” he said. “The folks that I work with presently, every month they are making price changes. They see extraordinary value in it as well.” Kintone also gives him and his team muchneeded flexibility to import inventory from multiple sources without creating a roadblock. Throughout the whole process, Kevin said he was impressed with the customer support.

“That’s a big reason why I chose Kintone,” he said. “I was totally blown away by the solution, but what led me to that point was the people involved who really cared about my problem.”