By Jane Steen, Head of Engagement at ETL.
A manufacturer can usually tell you, to the trim and the paint code, how many vehicles left the production line in the last quarter. Ask how many vehicles are still being serviced somewhere in its own network, and the answer tends to be harder to find. It’s not because nobody is paying attention, but because the information sits in places that the manufacturer often can’t quite reach.
The DMS data challenge
This is one of those problems that feels like it shouldn’t exist. The OEM makes the car; the dealer sells and services it. On paper it looks like a single chain, but in practice the customer relationship, and most of the useful data that comes with it, lives with the dealer. Sales records, service history, contact details, warranty claims…much of it is held in dealer management systems and local CRMs that were chosen by the dealer, for the dealer, often years ago.
It’s not difficult to see how it happened. Dealers are independent businesses running their own operations, and the systems they picked usually made sense at the time. But it does mean that when an OEM wants a clear view across its network – who is still coming back for servicing, or how far a recall has actually travelled – it’s often assembling that picture from dozens of sources that were never designed to line up together.
The instinct, when this becomes painful, is to reach for something ambitious. A new platform, perhaps. Sometimes that’s warranted, but more often the problem is smaller and more structural than it first appears. The data mostly exists, but it’s fragmented across systems that have no reason to agree with each other.
That’s where the real effort sits. The same customer shows up as three different records. A VIN is entered slightly differently in two markets. One dealer group runs software from a different decade to the one next door. Before an OEM can see its network, someone has to reconcile all of that into a shared view, where a vehicle is one vehicle and a customer is one customer. We spend a good deal of our time on exactly this kind of matching and mapping, and it is almost always harder than the original brief assumed.
Practical solutions that anyone can implement
If you’re starting to pull the network picture together, a few things tend to make the work less painful than it looks.
Anchor everything on the VIN first. It’s the one identifier that nearly every system in the chain already shares, even when the customer records disagree about names, addresses and most other details. Getting vehicle identity right is a solvable first step. Customer identity resolution, which is the genuinely hard part, becomes far more manageable once each record is at least attached to the same vehicle.
There’s also no need to wait for a perfect data-sharing agreement before anything begins. Often, more information flows back to the OEM than people might assume, mostly through warranty and service claims that are already arriving. Building a first view from what you receive today can be quicker than negotiating for everything you would like, and it gives you something concrete to show a dealer when you do ask for more.
It helps to pick one question worth answering and build towards that, rather than towards a general sense of visibility. Recall reach and aftersales retention are two measures that tend to justify the effort on their own terms. A working answer to a single valuable question gains more trust internally than a network-wide programme that takes eighteen months to produce its first chart.
It’s also worth being honest about the dealer relationship. Sharing customer data is commercially sensitive, and we find that the arrangements that hold up over time tend to give the dealer something back, such as cleaner records, or leads that are actually warm.
And don’t underestimate the markets problem. Different regions use different DMS vendors under different data protection rules, and something that half-works everywhere is harder to untangle than something that works properly in one place. In our data integration projects, we often aim to get a single market right and then repeat the pattern, rather than spread the same compromise across all of them.
In the end, once the data is flowing properly, what tends to surprise people is how much value is already sitting within it. Once the OEM can see aftersales activity across the network with any confidence, questions that used to be estimates, such as retention or the reach of a campaign, start to have answers. The data was there all along; it just wasn’t all speaking the same language.
If any of this sounds familiar, it often appears first in aftersales or network quality conversations, long before anyone calls it a data problem. We find that it’s usually worth looking at the plumbing before committing to a bigger strategy. Happy to have a conversation if you’re dealing with this.
