Platform and Process Automation

PROBLEM

Fortellis, CDK Global's technology platform, is a secure, open exchange marketplace created to promote innovation and collaboration by connecting software developers, OEMs (original equipment manufactures) and automotive dealerships to digital tools which facilitate every single step of a car buying and selling experience..

Onboarding individual users to Fortellis and the organizations they were affiliated was a three-step, manual process. Once a user's account was approved an account for their organization had to be created. After both accounts were created, reviewed and approved the individual user was manually linked to the proper organization account. This process took anywhere from a few days to a few months and the backlog for reviewing and approving accounts brought adoption of the Fortellis platform to a complete stand still.

This manual process mitigated perceived risks raised by sales and engineering leadership around potential bad actors hacking the platform, needed to be automated to eliminate existing barriers to user adoption AND had to address the concerns of eight cross-functional team leaders.

SOLUTION

I met individually with each team lead to better understand their concerns. I uncovered a slew of database requirements and back-end limitations and identified viable solutions for most. I brought my cross-functional peers together, facilitated weekly discussions and working sessions to solve for things outside of my teams purview and to get everyone's buy in. Eventually we had 100% alignment on a path forward, an understanding of what each team was responsible for and we agreed on the delivery timeline..

The final solution still required a manual review process for organizations but individuals are able to create an account and self-select an existing organization to link their account to or create a new one and login immediately.

OUTCOME

The adoption rate increased 94% despite a manual review process still required for organizations,. Individuals are able to create an account, link themselves to an organization or create one at which point they can log into and manage their account.

Over 5400 dealer integrations are consuming APIs published on the platform with over 850+ million transactions logged to date.