Automotive Avenues is the largest independent used car dealership in New Jersey. They move serious volume. And for years, their morning routine was a nightmare of browser tabs and scattered data.
I'm sharing this case study because their story is one I've heard from dozens of dealers across the country — franchise and independent. The details change, but the problem is always the same.
The Tab Problem
Here's what their general manager's browser looked like at 7:45 every morning:
- DealerTrack DMS — deal status, accounting, operational backbone
- DealerTrack F&I — lender submissions, funding status, contract details
- VinSolutions CRM — leads, follow-ups, appointment schedule
- vAuto — inventory pricing, market comparisons, aging reports
- Rapid Recon — reconditioning workflow and cycle time
- CIT sheet — cars-in-transit tracking
- Buying center spreadsheet — auction purchases, pending acquisitions
- StoneEagle Menu — F&I product menu presentation and tracking
- VistaDash — performance analytics and reporting
- Xtime — service scheduling and throughput
- Floorplan portal — curtailment dates, payoff amounts, interest accrual
- Reinsurance statements — reserve tracking, claims, portfolio performance
Twelve data sources. Twelve logins. Twelve different interfaces showing twelve different slices of the same business. And that's not counting the ones they'd open throughout the day.
What It Actually Cost Them
The obvious cost was time. Their GM was spending the first 45 minutes of every day just pulling numbers. Not analyzing them. Not making decisions. Just copying data from one screen into a spreadsheet so he could see the full picture.
But the real cost was worse than wasted time.
Sales meetings started late because the data wasn't ready. When the meeting finally kicked off, the first 15 minutes were spent debating numbers. The CRM says a certain call volume, CarWars says another. DealerTrack shows a salesman has 28 accepted deals for the month, he claims it should be 29 deals. What got unaccepted? Every meeting started with "wait, which number is right?" instead of "here's what we need to do today."
They also missed things. One quarter, their aging inventory rose above 175 cars over 90 days old. But by the time they noticed, it had ballooned to 200 cars over 90 days old. Solving an aging inventory problem is like steering a cruise ship — it takes time to resolve itself, even once you start turning the wheel. Turn the wheel too late and you run the ship aground. Had they noticed sooner, they would have repriced sooner. Instead, they were playing catch-up for weeks.
That kind of lag was just one example. Multiply that by the number of times something slipped through the cracks because the data was spread across twelve different places, and the annual cost was real money.
Why Nobody Was Solving This
They looked for solutions. The franchise world has OEM-mandated platforms that at least attempt to centralize things — but even those don't cover all twelve sources. Independent dealers are completely on their own.
The DMS vendors will tell you their system is the hub. But DealerTrack doesn't show you your vAuto pricing data. VinSolutions doesn't know your floorplan curtailment dates. Rapid Recon doesn't talk to StoneEagle. Each vendor built their portal to be a destination, not a data source. Nobody had an incentive to pull it all together.
That's exactly why we built Voltra.
Implementing Voltra
Automotive Avenues was one of Voltra's first implementations. We connected all twelve data sources into a single dashboard that their GM could open instead of a dozen browser tabs. Deal flow from DealerTrack DMS and F&I, leads from VinSolutions, inventory health from vAuto, recon status from Rapid Recon, menu performance from StoneEagle — all on one screen.
On the first morning they used it, their standup meeting took 15 minutes instead of an hour. Everyone was looking at the same numbers. There was nothing to argue about.
The Results
After running Voltra for three months, here's what changed at Automotive Avenues:
- Morning meetings went from 45–60 minutes to 15 minutes. That's 30+ minutes of selling time back on the floor every single day.
- Data arguments stopped. When everyone's looking at the same dashboard, you skip the "which number is right" debate and go straight to "what do we do about it."
- They caught aging inventory before it spiraled. The consolidated view flagged that their 90-day-old count was climbing — they caught it at 120 units and started repricing immediately. Without Voltra, that number would have ballooned by the time anyone noticed. Solving aging inventory is like steering a cruise ship: the earlier you turn the wheel, the less damage you take.
- F&I tracking improved. When they could see product penetration rates next to the deal data in real time, their F&I manager started catching gaps in coverage the same day instead of at month-end.
None of this was magic. There's no secret formula. They just stopped making their people waste time logging into twelve different data sources to piece together information that should have been in one place from the start.
Why This Matters for Every Dealer
When other dealers heard about what changed at Automotive Avenues, the reaction was always the same: "We have the exact same problem. Can we use that?"
The answer is yes. The problem is universal. Franchise groups with 30 rooftops have this problem multiplied across every store. Single-point independents have it concentrated into one GM's morning. The fragmentation, the wasted time, the missed signals — it's happening at every dealership that runs more than a couple of vendor platforms. Which is all of them.
If your morning routine looks anything like Automotive Avenues' used to — a dozen tabs, 45 minutes of number-pulling, meetings that start with data arguments — we should talk. Not because I want to sell you software. Because I've seen how much better it gets when you fix this.