2:49 pm, November 25, 2024
Logistics keeps any business going, but when it comes to moving cars it becomes an expensive and challenging thing to do.
Jigcar was born from a realisation that creating your own system to manage logistics would cost a huge amount of money, as co-founder & CEO Elliot Perks explained on the Car Dealer Podcast, so his team have created an AI powered system that will save dealerships money and time.
The system is more than just a way of analysing dealers’ own data too. Unlike many other systems that can look at different parts of the car journey from purchase to sale, Jigcar is an operational tool that can actually move your stock from place to place and tell you in what location it’s the most valuable.
Perks, pictured above bottom left with the Jigcar team, said: ‘For my sins, I am an ex-Cazoo employee, and founded Jigcar based on what we found working there on the logistics and technology side. Jigcar is essentially a platform for dealers to control, manage and cut the costs of their logistics.
‘We’re then going to step further using AI to put cars in optimal locations and optimise the use of any internal resources a dealer might have, like trucks or drivers.’
Perks and his two Jigcar co-founders met at Cazoo, and without the time there they wouldn’t have created what could be a revolutionary service for the industry.
He explained: ‘The normal movements we see for our customers are site-to-site, rather than home deliveries. Cazoo did a lot of site-to-site movements too, and what we were tasked with finding when I was there was a solution to manage this.
‘We looked far and wide and tried lots of different providers, but they were made for moving parcels and fast moving consumer goods. They weren’t built for the nuances of the automotive industry.
‘For example, trade plate drivers who aren’t actually in a truck and need to get from B to C using public transport, or loading cars onto transporters. So Cazoo really struggled to find a solution and we realised internally that we’re going to have to build it in house but they didn’t want to do that, even with 400 engineers.
‘It’s like building your own internal banking software. You just don’t want to do that.
‘We then went and spoke to big franchise dealers to find out how they were doing it and realised there was an opportunity. That’s the rabbit hole that’s now my life at Jigcar.’
Jigcar is now moving into its next phase with its AI offering, built on the data they are now gathering.
‘The thing with AI is it’s nothing without good data,’ said Perks. ‘We’re still in the build phase of that because we’ve had to gather data.’
‘There are so many exciting ways you can use it in logistics, whether it’s matching up movements going from A to B and a car going the other way B to A.
He explained: ‘Whether it’s appraisals of vehicles as they’re dropped off. There’s so many exciting ways to leverage it.’
‘One of the most exciting ways is you want to sit across all of your data sources to do with your sales data. Let’s say you’ve got Auto Trader sales data and your localised retail ratings, you’ve got your past DMS data, you’ve got data on what is your stock mix at different sites.
‘If we sit across that, we can start to see that instead of buying more stock for site A, maybe there are cars down at site C that are idle that can be moved up to site A. Then we actually have the ability within the platform for that to happen.
That’s why we call ourselves operational software. It’s not just about data and dashboards, it’s about making things actually happen on the shop floor.’
