Mike Hanna says his company’s platform “geo-automates complex reconditioning tasks.”

“Our platform basically puts vehicle recon on ‘autopilot,’” said Hanna, who is chief executive officer of TrueSpot, a new Internet of Things asset location platform. Last week, the company announced the commercial launch of TrueRecon, a reconditioning tracking platform for auto dealers.

TrueSpot said it developed the new technology to better manage automotive dealership inventory and speed up what it describes as “costly, highly dispersed auto reconditioning (recon) processes.”

The company said it can accelerate those processes by an estimated 15% to 20%.

TrueSpot said auto dealers “coordinate multiple phases of servicing to prepare vehicles for sale.” That, according to the company, often includes 10 to 20 tasks involving various on-lot and off-lot departments and locations.

Those tasks can include duties such as upholstery repairs, tire replacement/alignment, body work, paint, and detailing, the company said.

In a news release, the company described itself as “the industry’s first solution that pinpoints the exact location of vehicles and keys throughout this process.”

Formerly known as MOLOCAR, TrueSpot was founded in 2017 by mobile technology insiders and auto dealership owners and operators for the purpose of inventing an improved dealer asset management and on-lot selling system.

The system integrates dealer back-office data. That helps streamline workflows and Lot Management 360 (digitizing the dealership), the company said. 

Hanna said TrueSpot eliminates the need for each department to manually call, schedule and transfer a vehicle for the next recon activity, which he said saves hours of staff time.

“It also alerts management when a vehicle falls overdue for a task, tracks and certifies all renovations and provides much more accurate analytical information for management,” Hanna said.

According to the company, dealers spend about $42 per day for each day a vehicle is in recon.

Because at any given time large dealerships can have hundreds of cars in recon, that has resulted in an environment that could cause misplacement of constantly moving keys and vehicles.

In that environment, auto dealers can spend tens of thousands per month replacing lost vehicle keys, TrueSpot said, adding that it can result in wasting hours of productive employee time searching for inventory. 

With TrueSpot, dealers can place proprietary wireless locator tags inside vehicles and attach them to keys and other assets. TrueSpot combines that with a low-powered enterprise campus network and applications for Apple and Android wireless devices, which the company says helps dealerships quickly locate the assets and identify their recon status.

 “Cars and keys move around the dealer campus constantly, especially during the recon process,” Hanna said. “Keys are being handed off from person to person and department to department, on and off the dealership lot, and can easily get dropped in a pocket, a desk drawer or file folder and forgotten. It’s a significant problem across the industry.” 

The start-up said the $1 million in investment capital it is raising would add to the more than $700,000 it has already raised. The company serves about 12 dealer clients and is projecting to acquire 30 to 40 new dealer clients within the next nine months.