We are in the midst of a strong sales and fixed operations run for franchised and independent dealers.  In addition to record new vehicle sales, the majority of dealers have instituted a used vehicle/CPO inventory and marketing approach which is capturing additional used vehicle sales and trade reconditioning adding bottom line profits and additional customers to their data base.

In order to drive these initiatives, many great ideas and software applications have surfaced to assist dealers with new and used inventory stocking, mining their data bases for positive equity, service appointments, F&I sales opportunities, marketing/advertising campaigns and various other analytics which either help gain additional sales or improve bottom line profits.
The software applications companies who are dealer partners need the dealer’s data for optimizing many of these tools.  While this data distribution is key for current and ongoing industry development and growth, it clearly needs to have security and control measures implemented for protecting the consumer data at a fair and reasonable price.

The methods and options for securely distributing DMS data continue to grow for dealer/vendor partnerships.  Options which exist today are DMS certification processes, dealer push of the data from the DMS to the partner or use a cloud based tool which allows the data to move once from the DMS and then distributed to the multitude of partners.  All of these are viable options which should be investigated for determining which support the partner, dealer and industry needs for specific applications.

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