Introduction
Helping Cazoo Wholesale improve efficiency and reduce costs through automation
The Client
Cazoo Wholesale has over 30 years’ experience remarketing and managing vehicles for many of the UK’s leading organisations. With thousands of vehicles passing through their systems each week, they need seamless processes at every stage.
The Challenge
Cazoo Wholesale have been benefiting from Emerge Digital’s ongoing technology strategy for a while. Through this process, our team and client identified an opportunity to update and automate one of their manual filing processes.
Up to 600 times a month, the team at the Cazoo Wholesale had to gather information from V5c documents (vehicle log book documents). To do this, they’d need to search through a filing cabinet, get the information, scan the document and refile it. This was not only time-consuming, it was also open to human error. Occasionally files were misplaced or lost, and the company would have to pay for a replacement.
Our job was to streamline this process and help the team to save time and money.
Our Solution
We started by using Power Automate – one part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Instead of manually scanning and sending on the information from the V5c documents, we set up an automated process using their existing infrastructure to scan the V5c documents, turn them into PDFs and automatically email them to a designated address.
From here, artificial intelligence extracts the registration numbers from each PDF document. The file is then renamed as the car registration number and added to an agreed document library in SharePoint for all of the business to access.
In addition to this, we used a similar process to extract and safely store registration numbers from service history documents.
Going forward, we will be using automation to extract more information from documents, including the number of owners as well as emissions data. This will be automatically carried over to Cazoo Wholesale’s bespoke data system.
"Thanks to Emerge Digital, Power Automate has helped us save time and money, and with their help, we will be looking at streamlining more of our processes."
Jenny Hodson, Office Manager - Cazoo Wholesale
The Outcome
This simple process has had significant benefits for the Cazoo Wholesale team. Team members can now access data instantly, wherever they are, without having to search through a physical filing cabinet. Prior to this project, team members who were working remotely would have to call an onsite worker and ask them to go to the filing cabinet and send a scan of the document to them. Now, with instant access, this is no longer necessary.
What’s more, as the documents don’t need to be handled by multiple people, we’ve helped to reduce the loss and misplacement of files too.
The great news is, this was all done quickly and cost effectively. There are multiple ways of automating processes, so we worked to find the most profitable option for our client. Only one day was needed for the set-up and the Microsoft license is just £30.20 a month for 5000 credits (emails).
Due to the success of this project, the teams at Cazoo Wholesale are now considering more automation in the future.
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