Announcing Model Manager

by Kyle Verstrate, Data Management Product Owner

What is the Model Manager?

The Model Manager tool is a way for you to take the Showroom data that we have built throughout the years, and as an ongoing endeavor, and enhance or customize it to your dealership in order to get your units as complete as possible, as soon as possible.

Our Showrooms are able to enhance data via the AutoPopulate, Factory Feed Data Enhancement, and Incoming Feed Data Enhancement. That showroom data is only what is provided by official Manufacturer resources, such as their websites and sales books. Due to the nature of those systems they need to be a bit generic, and may have errors due to human elements, or out of date data. In the case of the Model Manager those are what we are calling our Default Templates.

This system allows you, via our dashboard, to enhance that data to appear exactly as desired immediately as a unit is created. These Templates are saved to your Dashboard, and will be used instead of our default data if you have gone through the steps to save your own Template.

To clarify a key point, this system will only affect units on creation. It will not retroactively change/adjust them. So when you save a template that template will apply to future units.

Check Out a Live Model Manager Demo!

Autopopulate:

Once activated by our support or Onboarding team, Navigate to creating a new unit within our Dashboard. Search for the unit you would like to create or template you would like to make, using the AutoPopulate Function.

From here you can populate data from our Showroom Database for any Manufacturer we have configured. If we do not have a showroom for a Manufacturer, please let our support team know and they will see if we can get them created!

Once you have loaded in the AutoPopulate template, you may then adjust the data that has loaded in, or add the data you would like to see. Anything in the above list of fields will be covered by the Model Manager Template system. Things like the Stock number and Location will not save as those are items that will need to be adjusted on a unit to unit basis.

When you have finished adding and adjusting the unit and are ready to save, you will see the Save as Model Manager Template in the top right, once you click that a pop up will appear asking you to confirm your save for that unit, with the details of the template it will save to.

This will save the template to your Saved Template List, for future use. If you need to save the changes and the unit you have created you will need to use the Save Inventory button as well, as they do have separate functions.

As you create templates, you will see them listed under Saved Templates when you click on the AutoPopulate dropdown.

If you click one of those Saved Templates, and hit Go, it will load in your template exactly how you have set it up and saved it previously.

If you need to make changes or Overwrite a previously made template, simply load it in via the AutoPopulate menu and make your change. Once the change has been made you will hit that Save as Model Manager Template button once again and it will confirm you want to Overwrite the saved template.

If we do not have an item in our Showroom and are not able to add if for you due to lack of Official Manufacturer data being available, you can still create a template for them if you are manually creating inventory. You will need to fill in all fields manually instead of starting with the AutoPopulate function and you can save and edit the template the exact same way as your other templates.

Incoming Inventory Feed:

Once set up by Onboarding or Support, you will be able to edit and save Templates so that when future units of the same Year, Make, Model, and Brand(if applicable), will load in using the Template you have created instead of, or in addition to, the default data from our system. It works much like the AutoPopulate method seen in the video above, but with the small difference of your unit will already be created and mapped to our Data Enhancement System. So simply going to a unit in your inventory and adjusting manually and saving those changes to the template will set up future units to load in using that template.

With this system you may see Lock Icons show up on fields as you add and adjust them. That is how that data is protected from future feed runs, and if you need adjustments made to protect data, or remove those protections, please touch base with our Support team.

Factory Feeds:

Factory Feed Templates will only work for PJ, Big Tex, and Charmac for the time being. We will be adding and communicating when we are able to add more of or Factory Feeds to this system!

To adjust Factory Feed Units, it will work a lot like the AutoPopulate process in the video above. In this circumstance as well, you will see the units created and can navigate to them and adjust them via the Save as Model Manager Template button. This will make it so if future units matching the one you have adjusted come in via that Factory Feed they will load in using the enhanced data you have added via the template system.