CAR | Vehicle Records Digitization for a Dealership Group
A mobile-first platform that digitizes every vehicle record and flags the risk items and service revenue inside it
BACKGROUND
Ajaia's work with this dealership group began with a store visit. On the floor, we watched staff answer basic questions about a vehicle, prior owners, an open recall, whether the big services had been done, by pulling a 50-page paper portfolio and flipping through it page by page.
Every used car carried one: the Carfax report, the original window sticker, the bill of sale, and years of repair orders, filed in whatever order they last went back in. When sales needed an answer, someone walked the folder over from the office. When service needed it, they walked it back.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The provenance of every vehicle lived on paper, so answering any question meant finding the folder first and reading through it second. That cost time on both sides of the counter. Staff spent it hunting records instead of working customers, and customers spent it waiting for an answer that should have taken seconds.
The records also held more than the questions being asked of them. Open recalls, title concerns, and overdue maintenance were sitting in those folders unread, which meant the group was storing service revenue in a filing cabinet without knowing it.
OUR APPROACH
Ajaia built CAR in six steps, each grounded in observations from the store visit:
We started on the showroom floor, logging which vehicle questions came up, who walked which folder between departments, and how long each answer took. CAR's requirements came out of that observation rather than a requirements meeting.
Carfax reports, bills of sale, window stickers, and service histories each carry predictable fields. We defined an extraction schema for each document type so OCR and AI could turn photographed pages into clean structured data, including the conditions that break most extraction: faded thermal paper, handwritten repair orders, and pages photographed at an angle in bad lighting.
A vehicle record carries facts a dealership can be held to. Odometer readings, title status, and open recalls are disclosure matters, not conveniences, so accuracy was tested before the tool was trusted. Extraction was scored field by field against documents staff had read manually, weighted toward the fields that carry consequence rather than toward overall page accuracy. Fields the system could not read with confidence surface as unverified with the source image attached, so a salesperson sees the original page instead of a confident wrong answer. The system says what it does not know.
The store visit made the design constraint obvious: salespeople want to stay on the floor, not walk to an office. So CAR was built to be fully usable from a phone, standing at the vehicle, mid-conversation. Any record on any vehicle is searchable in seconds, which means the answer arrives inside the customer conversation instead of after it.
Digitizing the folders revealed what the paper had been hiding. Once records were structured, open recalls, title concerns, and overdue service intervals became queryable across the entire inventory rather than discoverable one folder at a time. We built flagging into the platform so those items surface automatically, giving the service department a work list and the group a reason to contact owners it previously had no visibility into.
CAR launched at a single location, in the hands of sales and service staff working real vehicle folders. The pilot tested two things: whether extraction held up against actual document conditions on the lot, and whether staff would reach for a phone instead of walking a folder across departments. Both mattered, since accuracy without adoption produces a database nobody opens. We tuned extraction and adjusted the interface based on how salespeople actually used it on the floor, then rolled out across the remaining locations once accuracy and adoption held at the first site.
THE SOLUTION
CAR: a mobile-first platform that turns any pile of vehicle documents into one searchable, flagged, shareable profile.
RESULTS
Questions that used to send someone to a filing cabinet are answered at the vehicle, in front of the customer, from a phone. Record-hunting time across the group fell 96%, and that time went back into selling and servicing rather than walking folders between departments.
The revenue that had been sitting unread in the folders became visible. Automatically flagged recalls, title issues, and overdue services drove a 30% revenue increase out of records the group already owned, with no new inventory and no new marketing spend behind it.
Sales conversations changed too. A buyer now receives a complete, watermark-protected vehicle profile showing documented history and service work, which supports an asking price with evidence rather than assurance. The paperwork that used to slow the sale now helps close it.
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