When thieves broke into one of Hendrick Automotive Group’s dealerships, they stuffed 200 keys into a pillowcase, then ventured out to the lot and drove off with six or seven cars.
The theft shook up the dealership’s operations. As Robert Taylor, Hendrick’s vice president of IT, explained, “The worst part about it really wasn’t that they took six or seven cars. It was that they took 200 keys.”
As a result, 200 vehicles had to go on stop sale because the OEM didn’t have enough key fobs to replace the stolen ones — nor did it have enough vehicles to replace the unsellable inventory.
To prevent similar scenarios from occurring, Hendrick’s executive team wanted a key control solution that its dealerships could use in sales and service to protect each dealership’s inventory as well as customer vehicles being serviced.
The problem was, the group’s dealerships stored keys in a variety of places, including in boxes, vehicle-mounted lockboxes, offices, and other locations throughout the dealership. That made it difficult to audit key control practices across multiple dealerships.
“We’d have to call a hundred dealerships and pull a hundred different reports,” said Taylor.
The Hendrick team didn’t have to look far for a solution. “We had multiple versions of KeyTrak,” said CEO Ed Brown. “Here we had a great solution that wasn’t being implemented consistently across the company.”
Learn more about how Hendrick Automotive Group worked with KeyTrak to create an enterprise solution to solve its key management and reporting challenges.