Situation
The client is an insurance company that offers its policyholders the remarketing and valuation of vehicles as a service. The insurer has around 70 valuation offices throughout Germany, which have the relevant expertise in purchasing, valuation and logistics in cooperation with a garage chain and an auction house. Once the vehicle has been valued, the customer receives a vehicle price within 30 minutes.
The auction house handles the division into B2B and B2C goods, the logistics and the remarketing of approx. 70% of the vehicles (B2B). The remaining B2C-capable vehicles go to the insurance company’s own used car outlet, where they are reconditioned and marketed to end customers. Due to the company’s strong growth, all processes and the use of service providers should be reviewed, evaluated and, if necessary, optimized. At the same time, the Chief Operations Officer (COO) was responsible for the operational management of around 30 employees. The mandate was planned for 4 months and was terminated on time.
Challenges/scheduling
As COO, I was responsible for the entire process from valuation to sale. This included managing the employees and controlling all service providers for the valuation, logistics, reconditioning/repair and marketing of the vehicles. These processes should also be analyzed and optimized due to the strong growth in recent years.
Sustainable result
Due to the high vehicle volumes (approx. 10,000 units p.a.), the individual car dealership processes in the outlet were converted to industrial logistics and preparation processes that I was familiar with from my projects with large car rental companies. Much of the processing work was shifted to the service providers’ logistics centers, allowing us to expand our personnel and sales area capacities at the site. The “set-up times” until the vehicles are marketed have also been significantly reduced.
In the B2B area, we optimized the vehicle valuation and created KPIs for verification. The pre-selection of B2B goods and the auction formats were also adapted and optimized in consultation with the service provider. As a result, we also achieved better marketing results here. The DMS system, which had to be enriched with many Excel tables, was thoroughly reviewed. Here, the processes were first adapted for IT capability and then integrated into the DMS system via interfaces. The medium-term recommendation here was to install a new DMS system.
Conclusion
Through my involvement, external expertise was purchased and at the same time implemented within the company together with colleagues and employees. The rapidly growing company was therefore not slowed down by the organizational adjustments.
