Automotive
Syncing Dealer Inventory Across 40 Locations in Real Time
A 40-location automotive dealer group was losing sales to inventory blind spots. We built the real-time sync layer that connected every dealership, every system, and every vehicle — live.
Client
National Dealer Group (Confidential)
Industry
Automotive
Services
API Engineering, Real-Time Data Infrastructure, ERP Integration
Location
United States
The Challenge
Each of the 40 dealerships ran its own Dealer Management System — and none of them spoke to each other. Sales staff had no visibility into what was sitting at a sister location 20 miles away. Customers were arriving for vehicles that had already been sold, or walking out because the colour or trim they wanted wasn’t in stock locally — when it existed elsewhere in the network. Inter-dealership vehicle transfers were coordinated by phone, email, and spreadsheet, taking days to arrange for something that should have taken hours.
The operations team had no way to see fleet movement, stock aging, or demand patterns across the network in aggregate. The business was running 40 isolated silos that happened to share a brand name. They needed a live inventory fabric that connected every DMS, surfaced network-wide availability to sales staff in real time, and gave the ops team the visibility to manage inter-location transfers as a planned process — not a reactive scramble.
The Solution
A unified real-time inventory platform with bi-directional integrations across five different DMS vendors, a live availability API powering every sales touchpoint across the network, and a fleet transfer dashboard giving ops full command of inter-location vehicle movement.
Multi-DMS Integration Layer
Engineered bi-directional connectors for five different Dealer Management Systems — normalising inventory data into a canonical schema and syncing changes network-wide within 60 seconds of any update at any location, regardless of the source system.
Real-Time Availability API
Built a public-facing inventory API that provided live vehicle availability across all 40 locations to the dealer website, in-showroom sales tools, and third-party listing platforms — eliminating the lag between physical stock movement and digital availability.
Transfer Orchestration Dashboard
Designed the ops dashboard for end-to-end inter-dealership vehicle transfer management — from request and approval through logistics tracking and DMS update confirmation — replacing the phone-and-spreadsheet process with a structured, auditable workflow.
Locations connected under a single live inventory view
Reduction in customer disappointment incidents from stock errors
Different DMS systems integrated into one canonical data model
Maximum network-wide inventory sync latency
Increase in inter-dealership vehicle transfer volume