CDK Global hosted more than 200 of the best programmers, coders and graphic designers in Portland, Ore., during its recent Summer Hack-a-thon.

Being CDK’s fourth Hack-a-thon event, CDK aimed to bring together associates and summer interns to invent new ways the company can leverage technology to benefit the company’s dealer clients.

Over the course of five days, more than 30 teams collaborated to create new ideas to put into further development.

Rajiv Amar, CDK’s division vice president of development, commented on the event, which is representative of the company’s focus on innovative culture and collaboration.

“The level of associate engagement, innovation and creativity completely exceeded our expectations in every way,” Amar said. “This was our best hack-a-thon ever — with the focus of bringing better technology to our dealer clients.”

Each team was given five minutes to present their innovations during the event’s demonstration day on Friday.

Here are a list of the winning ideas, according to the company:

• Project: Caller ID interface that delivers real-time, on-demand consumer (caller) intelligence.

• Project: A deal dashboard that summarizes the status and financial health of a deal, along with flagging missing data.

• Project: Join CDK ServiceEdge with Common Services for one-click provisioning and real-time appointment capacity management.

• Project: Monitor and certify network configurations related to QoS, Netflow and SNMP data.

• Project: Run a Dealer Management System (DMS) in VirtualBox on your workstation. Imagine having a smaller library of virtual machines that are managed by your team and Global Hosting. The number of total images could be significantly decreased, thus reducing overall costs.

Greg Meyer, the company’s chief technology officer, said the ideas generated during the event demonstrated movement in the right direction.

“We are focused on the right things and on improving the CDK experience,” Meyer said. “We weren't just playing around this week — we were solving real business problems and doing work that we can put into production today. The cross-functional alignment has never been stronger in Portland. I'm moved by all the passionate work that went into this week. We are in a perfect position to take on the future."