Background
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Mission, Kansas, VinSolutions is the data service middleman between car dealerships and internet car marketing companies like AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. The company not only manages its own data integration but is also responsible for integrating its software into the dealership management system (DMS), the core software application that automates car dealerships. In addition, VinSolutions works with another 60 to 80 smaller DMSs as well as custom-built DMSs.
Use Case
VinSolutions bears the brunt of the data integration challenges for AutoTrader and the other websites that dealers use to advertise their vehicles. Each car may have over 100 pieces of data that need to be updated daily. That includes critical data, such as the list price, along with various other pieces of metadata that determine how the vehicle should be listed. With listings on more than a million cars requiring updates every day, each with their own massive heap of data, the scale of the challenge for VinSolutions approaches big-data territory.
One of the big advantages in using Astera is it allowed us in development to build the core data flows, which then allows non-developers in our implementation department to use Astera to build sub-flows to connect into those core data flows
Enter Astera
After evaluating several data integration software solutions, VinSolutions chose Astera because it provided all the functionality they needed, including automated ETL and an easy-to-use interface that enabled even non-IT employees to operate the software smoothly.
Astera’s data extraction capabilities allowed VinSolutions to seamlessly extract data from various DMSs, regardless of their customized configurations. This ensured that VinSolutions could efficiently access and integrate data from different sources without manual intervention.
Data transformation and mapping features also played a crucial role in standardizing the extracted data. VinSolutions could easily transform and map the data to a unified format, ensuring consistency and compatibility across systems. Data scheduling capabilities enabled VinSolutions to set up regular and automated data transfers, ensuring that the integrated data remained up-to-date and synchronized.
That enabled us to create an environment where we don’t have developers doing the actual configuration for every single independent dealer. It allows the variances from dealer to dealer to be configured in Astera by our implementation team building data sub-flows. Trying to write code to do all that–that’s a lot of heavy lifting.
According to VinSolutions senior programmer Mike Ethetton, it could take up to two months for a developer to do the custom coding to ensure the accurate capture of data from a new client’s DMS into the VinSolutions network. With Astera, that task has been cut to about an hour’s worth of work. With 70 to 100 car dealers going online with VinSolutions every month, the company has eliminated a lot of custom data mapping work on the part of its development team.
Every time we brought in a new dealer, there was a lot of development effort that had to be taken into account, whereas with Astera, it’s a lot faster process, and it doesn’t require a developer to be involved every step of the way.