Background:
Earth Motor Cars is the DFW area’s premier luxury, exotic and classic car dealership. With a passion for fine automobiles of all kinds, Earth Motor Cars stocks over 300 luxury vehicles, exotics, classic cars, and more. An experienced sales staff who are ready to share their knowledge and enthusiasm with customers, as well as a luxurious 70,000 square foot dealership, establish Earth Motor Cars as a trusted provider of luxury vehicles.
Problem:
As Earth Motor Cars continues to grow, they face increasing administrative workloads in the form of filing and managing sales contracts and other documents pertaining to the sale of vehicles. This, combined with an increasing demand for all services to be made available remotely, meant that Earth Motor Cars needed a system that would satisfy these needs while providing sales staff and customers with a secure portal through which to conduct business.
Solution:
In order to reduce clerical workload, we began by implementing a document management system that automatically tracks which documents have been completed and which documents are still pending. This system uses OCR to identify documents as they are being scanned or uploaded and saved to their customer’s profile. This eliminates the need for administrative staff to scan the document, identify the document, and then associate it with a required document in a customer’s profile.
This process was further simplified with the implementation of browser-native scanning services. After a one-time service package download, users are able to scan documents directly into their web browser, eliminating the need for users to navigate any scanner/printer applications.
Next, we added a webcam recording feature which allows customers to sign documents remotely as well as provides administrative staff with the necessary proof of signature. This, combined with the system’s ability to email uploaded documents directly to the customer, removes the need for customers to be present in-person in order to complete the sale of a new vehicle.
These features consolidated the entire process of collecting required documents into a much quicker and more easily accessible system. First, the sales staff sends all required documents to the customer. Second, the customer begins their webcam recording, and signs the documents on video. Last, with a single button click, the customer scans their signed documents and uploads them to their profile. From there, the system automatically identifies which documents have been submitted and checks them off a list of requirements for the sale. Administrators can now easily run reports to see what aspects of the sales process have not been completed, and quickly take corrective action if needed.
Technology:
Using Google’s Cloud Vision API, we implemented OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify and organize documents uploaded to the system. We also created web services to scan documents directly into the browser, as well as create and store webcam recordings. All documents and recordings are being stored using an Amazon AWS S3 bucket, meaning that administrators can easily navigate and manage their file storage by logging into the Amazon AWS console.
