Five vehicles recovered in an hour
When the alarm went off at a Don Franklin dealership, the IT director had footage on responding officers' phones within four minutes. The auto group says it has since saved or recovered more than $1 million in assets.
A car lot at night is a lot of unattended inventory, which is why dealerships get targeted and why their cameras have mostly served, in practice, to find out afterwards what was stolen. Don Franklin Automotive Group's account, published by Spot AI, is about the night that changed.
Four minutes
Josh Bowlin, the group's IT director, describes an alarm at one of the stores and what happened next.
Within four minutes of the alarm going off, I was able to have the video footage of the incident on the responding officers' cell phones. We had five recoveries within the hour. It is that easy, really.
Five vehicles came back within the hour. The case study puts the group's total at more than $1 million in assets saved or recovered. Whatever the exact figure, the mechanism is the four minutes. The officers had footage while the vehicles were still close by.
The Monday morning windshield
The second story is smaller and probably more familiar.
Sometimes, we roll into a dealership on a Monday morning and find a busted windshield on a car. Before Spot, we had to watch that entire weekend's worth of footage, but with Spot, we can find it in seconds.
A weekend is sixty hours of video per camera, and the old job was to scrub through it. Now someone asks when the windshield broke and gets a clip. The company says camera utilisation across the group rose 60 percent, which is a dry way of saying people started opening the system because it answered questions.
The service bays
The line I did not expect belongs to the service side of the business, where dealerships make much of their money.
My fixed operations director can monitor the processes in real time and let the Spot system give valuable analytics to help him make improvements. At the end of the week, that might add up to another $5,000 or $10,000 worth of income per site.
Fixed operations means the service bays. Watching how work moves through them, and where it stalls, is an operations problem that happens to be solvable with the cameras bought to stop theft. The case study also reports HR saving 10 to 15 hours a week and IT saving 5, mostly on reviewing incidents that used to take an afternoon.
Bought for the lot, used in the bays
A dealership buys cameras to protect inventory, and the first win at Don Franklin was exactly that. The lasting one is in the service department, which was not part of the purchase decision. That order of events, security first and operations later, shows up in several of the dealer and retail case studies Spot AI has published. If you run a dealership group, the question I would put to your own team is what they would stop doing. At Don Franklin it was watching sixty hours of weekend footage to find a windshield.