ONLINE USED CAR RETAILER CUSTOMER STORY
From Chaos to Control: How Oomnitza Reshaped a Leading Online Used Car Dealer’s Asset Management
98%
Endpoint Recovery Rate
$640K
Annual CapEx Savings
100%
NIST & SOC 2 Compliance
The Challenges
The retailer had already invested in and deployed Oomnitza’s IT Asset Management (ITAM) solution to manage the lifecycle of their hardware, software, and virtual technology assets.
When macroeconomic factors and softness in the retail market forced them to reduce their workforce by several thousand full-and part-time workers, the
A leading online used car retailer struggled to manually manage more than 13,000 laptops and mobile devices using spreadsheets, resulting in:
- A sub-par offboarded employee endpoint recovery rate of only 50%.
- Operations with a 70% risk of human error.
- A lack of holistic asset visibility and precise inventory control, leading to compliance adherence issues.
The Outcomes
By deploying Oomnitza’s Modern IT Asset Management solution, the car retailer:
- Increased their endpoint recovery to 98%, saving over $600,000 annually.
- Automated workflows to eliminate the risk of human error.
- Attained a perfect 100% compliance rating with NIST and SOC 2 requirements.
- Accelerated procurement processes, simplifying forecasting and order tracking with trusted partners.
Business Profile
INDUSTRY
Automobile Dealers, Retail
EMPLOYEES
16,600
ANNUAL REVENUE
$13.6 billion (2022)
ENDPOINTS
13,000
About The Online Car Retailer
The company is a pioneering force in the online used vehicle market, rapidly becoming the fastest-growing used car retailer in U.S. history. They enable customers to purchase vehicles from home, backed by a 7-day money-back guarantee, nationwide inventory, and home delivery. The customer also facilitates the selling and trading of vehicles across its 300+ U.S. locations, including iconic Car Vending Machines. With a strong commitment to customer care and innovation, the customer ranks as the second most customer-centric automotive brand in the U.S., following only Ford on Forbes’ 2022 Most Customer-Centric Companies List. Impressively, the customer is one of the fastest companies to break into the Fortune 500.
Rocketship Growth Posed Monumental Tech Asset Challenges
The car retailer’s journey from 2016 to 2022 was an extraordinary success story, with growth exceeding 3,000%, catapulting annual revenues beyond $10 billion. This meteoric rise wasn’t just about numbers. It also triggered a rapid transformation in the workforce, swelling from a few hundred to over 10,000 employees.
What’s particularly remarkable is that a whopping 70% of their workforce occupied dynamic, high-turnover operational roles, including those in inspection centers, manufacturing facilities, and logistics teams handling car deliveries. As a result, the car dealer faced a never-ending cycle of onboarding and offboarding hundreds of employees weekly.
On top of that complexity, a significant portion of the car retailer’s workforce relied heavily on company-provided devices, laptops, and mobile devices spread across 300 locations. Managing this expansive arsenal of over 13,000 endpoints became a daunting task for their lean IT team, who relied on manual methods and clumsy spreadsheets, creating numerous challenges.
Plummeting Recovery Rates of Offboarded Employee Endpoints
The car retailer grappled with the taxing task of managing over 10,000 devices via manual spreadsheets. This resulted in a mere 50% hardware recovery rate for offboarded employee equipment, costing over $600,000 annually. Additionally, accurately tracking devices within a vast network of 300 locations was increasingly challenging, leading to unnecessary purchases and underutilized returned devices.
Inadequate Inventory Control Jeopardizes Compliance
The used car retailer knew their lack of asset visibility posed a significant compliance challenge. Adhering to strict NIST and SOC 2 standards required meticulous asset management, including accurate depreciation records, timely reporting to the Financial Business Analysis team, and proper asset removal. The absence of precise visibility hindered compliance efforts and exposed the company to potential regulatory violations.
Exposed Vulnerabilities in Laptop Security
The dealer’s vast network and limited asset visibility raised security concerns. Despite endpoint security tools that enabled critical functions like remote wiping and laptop lockdowns, their effectiveness depended on precisely pinpointing the physical locations of these laptops.
However, accurately doing so across 300 sites using spreadsheets was nearly impossible, hindering defense against potential laptop attack vectors.
Audits Strain Resources and Procurement Encounters Delays
The asset visibility deficit posed major hurdles for the car retailer in IT audits and expenditure forecasting. Accurate figures for auditors and finance were elusive.
Handling substantial hardware orders added complexity, since they required tracking of existing assets and deciphering incoming items, resulting in delays and manual spreadsheet updates. Automation was crucial for efficiency and accuracy due to a modest IT team and human error risks.
Course Correcting with Modern Technology Asset Management
To tackle these challenges, the car retailer strategically adopted a suite of third-party solutions to fortify operations, and although individually they are very effective tools, they often operate in isolation, lacking the comprehensive and unified view of the car retailer’s technology asset landscape. They didn’t deliver the automation that is so paramount for conserving resources and reducing IT risk.
That’s where Oomnitza’s agentless Modern IT Asset Management solution shines. By leveraging Oomnitza’s developed and supported connector integrations with these tools, the car retailer established a seamless, bidirectional communication channel that operated in near real-time between their technology management tools and Oomnitza. This transformative integration empowered Oomnitza to serve as the single source of truth for the car retailer’s technology assets, significantly reducing reliance on manual interventions.
What’s more, this capability proved particularly valuable in tracking endpoint changes, a task susceptible to oversight and errors when managed manually through spreadsheets. With Oomnitza, automated workflows are seamlessly captured, ensuring precise endpoint tracking without the perpetual need to painstakingly locate assets and update records.
Optimizing Asset Lifecycles for Complete Compliance and Eliminating Waste
Through Oomnitza, this online used car retailer was able to gain trusted technology asset visibility, enabling smart decisions that curb waste, enhance compliance, and improve audit readiness. This, in turn, has resulted in substantial cost savings.
Replaced the Risk of Human Error with Automation
Oomnitza’s automation has revolutionized the car retailer’s asset management. They now save valuable IT hours each week, eliminating manual data maintenance. Additionally, they slashed the risk of human error by 70% by utilizing Oomnitza’s supported connectors, ensuring a more accurate technology asset database. They also enhanced efficiency and accuracy by using Oomnitza’s workflow automation to streamline employee offboarding, reducing manual touches from over 30 to zero.
Improved to 100 Percent Compliant with their NIST and SOC 2 Requirements
They also used Oomnitza’s automation to speed up procurement by fivefold, enhancing forecasting and tracking. This not only expedited the process but also prevented human errors.
The car retailer now efficiently accesses critical data, simplifying audit procedures and achieving a remarkable 100% compliance rate with NIST and SOC 2 requirements, thanks to Oomnitza’s comprehensive visibility.
Reduced Wasteful CapEx Spend on Endpoints
The online car dealer also achieved a remarkable enhancement in the endpoint recovery rate for offboarded employees. The numbers soared from 50% to an incredible 98%, resulting in more than $600,000 in annual savings. Since this meant IT could effectively repurpose recovered devices over a two-year period, the car retailer didn’t have to procure a single new endpoint for incoming employees.
Unlocked Financial Efficiency and Optimized Asset Lifecycles
The car retailer has improved coordination between IT and accounting, leading to precise asset lifecycle management and accurate depreciation accounting, resulting in $65,000 in annual personal property tax savings. Additionally, they used Oomnitza’s tracking capabilities to optimize warranties and repairs, enhancing overall asset management and device lifespan.
“Thanks to Oomnitza, we’ve gained complete visibility on all of our endpoint devices. This empowered us to make informed procurement decisions, particularly as we prioritize cost and process efficiency.”
Vice President
Technology Services
Automation That Delivered Immediate Results
The retailer reached out to the Oomnitza Customer Success team for assistance. After reviewing requirements, the Oomnitza team recommended the Separation-to-Recovery (S2R) Secure Offboarding Process, which was fully implemented within 10 business days.
The retailer leaned on Oomnitza’s powerful low-code workflow engine to deploy the S2R process and automate repetitive, manual, and error-prone tasks. By leveraging the flexibility and expandability of the solution, the company was able to quickly pivot their business in response to external economic and market conditions.
The results were almost immediate.
The retailer was able to process a large number of offboarding employees, with little or no manual interaction. Not only did they successfully recover most of the employee-assigned endpoints, but they also achieved security framework compliance and protected company data from unauthorized access.
As a result of expanding their use of Oomnitza, the retailer was able to realize significant cost savings, security improvements, and IT efficiencies.
Major Cost Savings
The home improvement retailer successfully reclaimed 98% of endpoints from departing employees. This, by itself, achieved savings of several million dollars.
Major Cost Savings
As the extensive number of manual processes for offboarding thousands of employees was reduced, their IT team was able to save hundreds of hours per month and keep their scarce IT resources focused on business critical projects.
Security Improvements
The completion time to remove access to key systems for departing employees as a result of using the automated S2R process was reduced to a few minutes, and they were able to achieve compliance with CIS and NIST frameworks. This dramatically reduced the risk of proprietary data exposure to unauthorized persons.
Zero-Touch Automation
The retailer extended their use of automation from technology lifecycle management to secure employee offboarding. They reduced the level of effort with over 40 manual touch points and help desk tickets down to a zero-touch automated offboarding process.
