During an interview at last month’s NAAA Convention, Shane O’Dell outlined the process a buying dealer traditionally goes through to turn a wholesale purchase into a retail-ready car.

After making the purchase, the dealer has to pick the car up or have it transported to his or her store. Then, it’s time for an inspection of the vehicle. After the inspection, the dealer has to take care of whatever needs fixing, be it body work, mechanical, interiors and so forth.

Still then, the dealer must merchandise the car and take care of any finishing touches like making sure it has two keys.

All of that certainly is a process, one that can certainly take time and the dealer’s attention away from other meaningful tasks — like, for instance, taking care of recall work that would come through the body shop.

With that in mind, now Manheim is offering to, essentially, perform that retail-readying for dealers through a Retail Solutions offering it is piloting.

“All those things being done are done various ways at a dealer. A franchised dealer probably does most of that work themselves. An independent dealer might have to farm out a lot of that work. A major dealer is probably similar to a franchised dealer. Maybe they have a facility (or) they don’t have a facility,” said O’Dell, Manheim senior vice president of vehicle solutions.  “So what we learned here in the last eight to nine months is, we have these facilities, the asset – the car – is sitting at those facilities, what if we started providing those services to complement our customer?”

That’s exactly what Manheim has been doing in Denver and Chicago through respective partnerships with Sonic Automotive and DriveTime.  

The crux of it is, Manheim will handle those necessary steps from retail inspection and retail reconditioning to merchandising and transport to the dealer’s lot via Ready Auto Transport.

“You’ve bought the car. We did all the work. We dropped the car off at the front line. Now, all you have to focus on is the customer experience and retailing that car,” O’Dell said.

The whole process centers on making it simpler for the dealer and performing quality work fast. Dealers have less on their plates and can focus on the customer service. But it goes beyond that, O’Dell said.

For instance, it can allow franchised dealers to use their body shop for more consumer work instead of just getting its own cars ready for sale.

Partnerships with Sonic, DriveTime

The Retail Solutions work between Manheim Denver and Sonic’s Colorado-based EchoPark Automotive used-car standalone platform has been going on a while, O’Dell says, but efforts began to crank up in earnest during the first quarter of this year.

Meanwhile, Manheim Chicago and DriveTime partnership officially began Aug. 1

For both partnership, the emphasis has been on collaboration, learning from the dealers’ own processes and fine-tuning where the work can go from here. Both partnerships are aiming for expansion.

“Chicago was a good starting ground for us, because we opened that up on Aug. 1 to other customers to start offering these solutions to those customers, so we’ve actually been onboarding six or seven new customers over the last couple of months,” O’Dell said.

“And we’re still in a pilot phase, if you will. And when I refer to pilot phase, I’m talking about not just our learning of the process, but the actual adoption of these services. Because keep in mind, these services have been done by dealers for a long period of time,” he continued. “But what they’re starting to recognize is that because that car has been located there, if we can get everything done in one-stop-shop at that location and get it to their front line, that might be much easier than what they’ve had to do in the past with getting a unit to the front line.

“And I think when they see that, and we’re able to meet those expectations, that’s really when the game changes from the standpoint of a customer really buying into it and it making a difference from a profitability and speed standpoint.”