When a dealer walks in the front door of the new ADESA Chicago auction, he or she might think it looks a lot like home.

And that is by design.

In designing the front office to the 167,000-square-foot auction in the Chicago suburbs, ADESA visited new-car dealerships throughout its home turf of Indianapolis to get a sense of how those stores were laid out, says Kurt Madvig, the company’s vice president of auction operations.

The goal, he said while showing Auto Remarketing the new digs on Friday, was for the dealer “to feel like he’s coming into his own office.”

Aside from floor plan finance and fleet/lease offices that are tucked away (for legal reasons), the front office has a spread-out feel to it, with a fair bit of open space and no long counters.

Walking through the front office and then through two pairs of double-doors under a horizontal cityscape image of Michigan Avenue, you enter the auction arena.

On the left side of the arena (from the entrance) are doors to the outside that can be opened and closed as necessary. Exhaust fans aim to keep the air fresh even if the doors are shut.

These doors feed into the auction lanes.

At the opposite are gateways to a space that’s still under the roof of the facility, but feeds out to the back of the facility.

From entry-to-exit, the vehicle essentially goes in a backward J route. This is designed to avoid the “wind-tunnel effect,” Madvig said.

No doubt that will come in handy, mere miles from the broad shoulders of the Windy City.  

In the lanes themselves, near the blocks are digital displays with lights, announcements and other bits of information. The point, Madvig said, is to make sure that the dealer in the lane — whether he or she is tech-savvy or not — has the same easy access to information to the person bidding online, simply by looking at the screens.

“It helps transition from the old paper days to digital,” Madvig said.

In addition to the ADESA-teal on the floor, another color you may notice in the arena is yellow.

Pylons in this hue line the lanes and are designed for safety. These steel tubes are filled with concrete, have plastic outer covers and go four feet into the ground, Madvig said.

Should a car go off course, this helps to keep it contained within the lane.

Another unique part of the facilities: the cafeteria and Internet are smack dab in the middle of the arena, allowing the dealer to “feel like this is the only place they need to be” during the sale, Madvig said.

Now, as far as those bright floors, they’re actually an epoxy surface with grit, which is designed to make them anti-slip with all the weather Chicagoland can get, be it rain, snow or ice.

Speaking of weather, the exterior is prepared for weather: besides the area out front, the entire facility utilizes rolled concrete instead of asphalt.

You will also see ADESA Chicago employees with mobile printers, vehicle stickers with bar codes and folks using mobile phone apps to conduct business.  All of this with the intention of making the customer’s day quicker and more efficient at the auction.

In other words, using technology to take care of the dealer’s needs within the walls of the arena and reduce the cycle time.

Meaning, they can get back home — and take care of retail business — sooner.

Read more: Part II of our look inside ADESA Chicago.