Vision Dealer Solutions went to academia to solve complicated computations finance offices regularly face.

The provider that offers VisionMenu, in collaboration with Purdue University Fort Wayne, released a lease payment solver that officials said this week will essentially reverse-engineer the setups for lease calculations with any dealer management system (DMS).

“Four years ago, we approached Purdue Fort Wayne’s mathematics department and its Center for Applied Mathematics and Statistics (CAMS) to help us solve a problem with matching lease calculations at auto dealerships,” VisionMenu president Ron Martin said in a news release.

“At the time, we had no idea what a chronic problem it was for dealerships that needed to match their DMS payments when using a third-party application,” Martin continued.

The process began as a research project to manually match the payment of the dealerships that used the Vision Dealer Solutions finance menu tool. After hundreds of test cases, the CAMS team discovered a pattern to the results, which launched the “Lease Payment Solver” project.

Officials indicated the tool now allows the user to get “penny-perfect” payments for vehicle leasing scenarios, regardless of the dealer’s management system. Martin said the company will use the tool for its proprietary purposes at first, but added they expect to share the technology with other third-party applications in the future.

Peter Dragnev, professor and chair of the university’s department of mathematical sciences, is co-director of the CAMS team that found the solution.

“Working with VisionMenu Inc. on the project was quite a rewarding experience for us,” Dragnev said.

Other members of CAMS team that worked on the solution include Jeff Anderson, co-director and professor of mathematics, and Dan Corian, associate professor of mathematics.