DALLAS -

In today’s supply-starved market, managing inventory can be a pressing — if not the most vital — concern for dealers. Dealers not only have to be able to get creative in how the find inventory, but they also have to manage it well and make educated decisions when it comes to buying, stocking and pricing. The founder of what is now AAX believes his new company can help dealers.

Explaining to Auto Remarketing late last week what makes his new company different than other inventory management systems on the market, Bruce Thompson — who founded American Auto Exchange — emphasized that what RedBumper has to offer dealers is essentially a streamlined, slimmer “hybrid” approach to inventory management.

“Ours is a hybrid between the two (AAX and vAuto) and so we really take a lot of the cluster and what-not out of the systems,” he told Auto Remarketing in an interview on Friday afternoon. “It’s very intuitive, it’s very simple to use.”

Calling the product “smart-phone centric” and “very flexible,” Thompson explained in more detail how RedBumper will work.

“The user scans a VIN … it gets the dealer everything he needs to know to make an intelligent decision. It has all of the listing and broadcasting capabilities, so a guy can buy a car at the auction and upload it to retail and have it out to a couple hundred sites within seconds, actually,” he said. “It basically does everything out there that’s available for at least a third of the price.

“I took a look at some of the systems that are there today … a lot of the dealers don’t use about 80 percent of what’s there because they’ve just become clustered. It’s kind of a corporate mentality, if you will,” he said. “And we’re kind of grassroots.”

The company has been conducting a pilot of some of its components since February with about 1,300 mostly independent dealerships through a private-label application, basically testing out a “skinny version of our tools,” he said.

“It’s just gone exceptionally well,” Thompson noted.

RedBumper believes about 2,000 dealerships will have the private-label initiative by year’s end.

Interestingly enough, a press release about the product sent out last was the company’s first massive marketing push, Thompson noted. But as of Friday, it had already elicited a big response.

“We are having dealers call here every hour on the hour. They’re hearing about it, they’re wanting the tools,” he noted.

Dealer installments are slated to begin in early October.

When asked about the top advantage to dealers using the product, Thompson said: “I think that (the top advantage of the product) is the ability to have connectivity wherever the buyers and the used-car managers are. We have a service-drive component to turn that service drive into an auction lane for the dealer.

“I think giving the dealer the most powerful suite of tools collectively all together in one package is a lot more intuitive at a much better price point is going to be the compelling driver for us,” he continued.

And as many can attest, actually finding the inventory can be extremely challenging for dealers these days. What the company’s SmartLot inventory analytic tool can help dealers do is make more educated decisions about acquiring inventory in the first place and get more out of the cars they do have.

“(SmartLot) absolutely helps them get the most out of their inventory,” Thompson stated. “So, by blending historical performance with market performance and looking at what they currently have in stock, we can actually tell them — based on SmartLot, the analytics that we have behind it — ‘Your current inventory is projected to yield you this turn time and this much profit in this period of time. If you were to make these acquisitions and liquidate this group of cars and get it in line with SmartLot, then your yield goes way up and your turn times go way down.’”

The company said that it has some new products on tap that “will be brand-new to the industry.”

What exactly will those be? When asked by Auto Remarketing about it, Thompson said he preferred to keep it under wraps for now, but did offer a sneak peak.

“I will tell you that they are consumer-oriented products that tie the consumer directly into the inventory management system in a very creative way,” he stressed.

For more information, visit www.redbumper.com.