Overview

pSonic Automotive is among the largest automotive retailers in the United States. These dealerships provide comprehensive services, including sales of both new and used cars and light trucks, sales of replacement parts, vehicle maintenance, warranty, paint and collision repair services, and arrangement of extended warranty contracts, financing and insurance for the company's customers. Sonic Automotive operates over 100 dealerships across 14 states and 25 major metropolitan markets, representing represent approximately 30 different automotive brands with the majority of dealerships being luxury and import brands. EchoPark, Sonic Automotive's used-car division, sources nearly 90% of its inventory of one- to four-year-old vehicles at auction, creating additional value for customers./p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pSonic Automotive and EchoPark work diligently to source and procure high-quality, nearly-new vehicles - most of which are still under factory warranty - and with clean accident histories. Ensuring that vehicles purchased at auction meet Sonic's high-standards is challenging, especially with the pace by which auctions proceed. Complicating matters: EchoPark is selling more vehicles now than ever. In 2018, EchoPark locations were selling around 1,000 cars a month; less than two years later, they are selling over 5,000 with plans to expand further. Previously, buyers would receive multiple Excel files filled with vehicle information which would have to be analyzed manually to determine which vehicles meet EchoPark’s quality standards and quickly determine the right purchase price. Beyond that, not just any vehicle will do for every market: certain colors, makes, models, and options sell better in different areas, so ensuring the right vehicles are procured to meet each market’s demand is vital./p pBuyers needed to click through several reports on multiple monitors to compile the right information. With fast-paced online auctions, every second counts. Sonic Automotive and EchoPark had hit a wall where their capability to run the business was being greatly hindered by their technological capabilities. In order to break through that wall, the team at Sonic Automotive knew that they needed a technological breakthrough./p

The Solution

pEchoPark’s buyers were at capacity. Overwhelmed with data, they needed to cut through the noise and quickly get to the bottom line. To support EchoPark’s growth and inventory needs, there were two options: dedicate more resources to the procurement process or leverage their investment in analytics to create tools to improve efficiency; Sonic opted to innovate. MicroStrategy has been providing BI and mobile analytics solutions to Sonic since 2011. In late 2018, Sonic was introduced to HyperIntelligence, a solution able to inject real-time, contextual analytics directly into the websites that buyers use to purchase vehicles. With this, buyers could have access to the same trusted data they relied upon without switching applications. They immediately saw its potential to drive revenue growth./p

The results

pThe goal of the BI team enabling this solution was to empower their business users to make split-second decisions in order to increase volume, scalability, and precision. Prior to the onset of this project, data and insights would be generated from complex predictive analytics models and disbursed daily in Excel format to the centralized buying group. Buyers would then analyze key data points and trends while researching hundreds of vehicles going to auction. Finally, buyers needed to make decisions such as which vehicles perform best with which trims and options in each market, the optimal market allocation, transportation costs, and only then the appropriate bid amount – manually. This all changed once HyperIntelligence was introduced to the organization. By simply hovering a cursor over the contextual hyperlinks generated by the HyperIntelligence web plugin, buyers are provided with a sleek, streamlined data analytics dashboard with insights derived from the same trusted data sources they have always relied upon. By integrating HyperIntelligence cards directly onto the auction sites, buyers have everything they need to make a bid decision in seconds without being buried in extraneous data. Time previously spent researching vehicles can now be dedicated to purchasing them to meet an ever-increasing demand./p

Metrics

pThe previously used technique of combing through multiple data sources to come to a buying decision was time consuming. Analyzing these data sets required more than four minutes per vehicle. This equates to over 330 manhours each month to research and identify the 5,000 vehicles required to meet demand each month. Further, the research sunk into vehicles which upon evaluation did not meet EchoPark’s high bar for quality, or for those on which EchoPark's buyers were outbid meant that countless more hours were lost due to the process./p pWith cards providing all the relevant data buyers needed to take the best action directly within their browser, the time from data to decision was dropped from around four minutes per vehicle to around ten seconds, an astounding twenty-four times faster than before. The result: buyers get to spend less time crunching numbers and more time securing the the right high-quality inventory for EchoPark's national network of locations./p

The Technology

pThe radical technology that enabled such amazing results is HyperIntelligence, by MicroStrategy. HyperIntelligence makes any system smarter by injecting contextual and real-time answers into the most popular web, desktop, and mobile applications. By hovering over a hyperlink, easy-to-design, customized cards containing the exact data and insights end-users need to make quick decisions are delivered with zero-clicks. With HyperIntelligence, answers find you./p

Disruptive Factor

pThe benefits of this breakthrough analytics solution were immediately apparent to the business. Instead of spending hours trudging through mountains of data, HyperIntelligence cards immediately lets buyers know which vehicles to spend their time investigating with zero clicks and zero bouncing between applications. HyperIntelligence cards are incredibly easy to create, taking only moments to build from a data set. Using the unique VIN as a keyword, Sonic’s HyperIntelligence cards refer to the connected relational database and display pre-determined metrics associated with the VIN. What’s more: HyperIntelligence is incredible easy to set-up and able deploy to authorized users with no more than a web browser extension. /p pThis is game-changing for EchoPark and its future growth. Instead of doubling down on resources to meet EchoPark’s growing demand, buyers are working smarter and more efficiently, giving them a sustainable, competitive edge over others competing in vehicle auctions, helping to keep prices low for consumers without sacrificing quality or selection./p

Shining Moment

pHyperIntelligence cards' contextual analytics are extremely customizable. The BI team made a huge leap when they realized that even the hyperlink that alerts users to the existence of a card can be customized. The team made a transformational decision: the hyperlinks created for vehicles that do not meet EchoPark’s needs would be red; those worth further investigation would be green./p pSonic Automotive pioneered “zero-hover” analytics to enable rapid data to decisions./p