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 large, valuable, unattended space, which is why dealerships have always been targets and why their camera systems have always been, in practice, a way of finding out what was stolen. Don Franklin Automotive Group's account, published by Spot AI, is about the moment 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, one 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 not in doubt: officers who can see what they are looking for, while the vehicles are still nearby, find them.
The Monday morning windshield
The second story is smaller and, for most dealers, 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. The old job was to scrub through it. The new job is to ask when the windshield broke and get 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 part that is not security
The most unexpected line belongs to the service side of the business, where dealerships actually make 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.
The pattern
A dealership buys cameras to protect inventory. The first win is exactly that, five cars in an hour. The lasting win is in the service department, where nobody was thinking about video at all. That order of events shows up in nearly every one of these stories, and it is why the useful question about a video agent is not what it catches, but what it lets people stop doing.