Building a New Client Portal and Bidding Application for Flexco
Discover how Flexco transformed fleet management by migrating historic data into the company’s Salesforce CRM and then building two new portals.
A Closer Look at Flexco: Driving Fleet Management Innovation for Automotive Remarketing
For over 30 years, Flexco has served as a leader in automotive remarketing services, providing customized services for today’s fleets—from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Flexco specializes in upstream remarketing and collaborates with corporations to buy and sell fleets. With an array of service offerings, ranging from transportation to title and registration, Flexco consistently has large amounts of vehicle data to manage.
In addition to serving their clients with fleet management, Flexco is also home to ZoomWarehouse: a one-of-a-kind bidding platform for their client’s employees to bid on pre-owned fleet vehicles before they are sold at a private auction.
Releasing a New Client Portal (FlexConnect) & Bidding Application (ZoomWarehouse)
The Challenge: Modernizing Digital Infrastructure to Streamline Fleet Operations
From powering fleet management to navigating their online auction platform, Flexco needed a robust digital system to efficiently handle massive amounts of vehicle data. Their existing platform needed to be updated, impacting operations, client services, and the user experience.
They required expertise in Salesforce to migrate existing data and build custom applications for fleet management and bidding
When Flexco approached LaunchPad Lab, they sought a trusted partner with extensive expertise on the Salesforce platform to migrate their system and integrate it further with the ZoomWarehouse platform.
Their goal was to develop a new software workflow that would streamline administrative team operations, offer clients various services, and provide an innovative vehicle purchase experience.
The Approach: Three Strategic Phases
After a dedicated discovery process with Flexco, LaunchPad Lab approached the project in three key phases:
- Data Migration: Automating migration of over a million records.
- New Client Portal: Developing FlexConnect on Salesforce Experience Cloud for streamlined reporting and client autonomy.
- Bidding Application: Revamping ZoomWarehouse with modern UX and enhanced functionality.
The Solution: Building FlexConnect and ZoomWarehouse for a Seamless User Experience
The solution included:
- FlexConnect
- A self-service client portal
- An updated ZoomWarehouse bidding application
FlexConnect provides custom reporting and visibility into vehicle status, while ZoomWarehouse simplifies the auction process with transparent vehicle data and tools for informed decisions.
Data Migration
Before starting the design and development of the new client portal and bidding application, the pre-existing data needed to be migrated.
The LaunchPad Lab team worked closely with Flexco to understand and analyze their existing data, which was not readily accessible through the current data vendor. From this discovery session, LaunchPad Lab mapped out a new system—including a complex data model that ensured accurate data mapping.
To streamline the data migration process, custom file migration scripts were created to scrape images and documents from Flexco’s original platform and upload them to the new portal. In addition, custom data migration scripts were built to automate the data migration process to migrate over a million records.
New Custom Client Portal, FlexConnect
Once the data was migrated into the new Salesforce database, the LaunchPad Lab development team launched the FlexConnect client portal in Salesforce Experience Cloud. This featured an authenticated portal where clients could quickly fill out a form and consign their vehicle for remarketing.
Enhancements were implemented over the year, including:
- Specific, custom vehicle condition and damage reports
- Photos for Flexco’s priority clients
- Custom reports and filtering for clients
- Reporting tables for various service offerings
These key features gave Flexco’s clients more autonomy to create their reports and deliver ongoing visibility on vehicle status. By including custom reporting and service offerings with detailed data and charts, the Flexco portal is a now comprehensive, robust self-service portal that provides a clear picture of all data.
New Bidding Application, ZoomWarehouse
The final step in the process was to create an updated bidding platform for ZoomWarehouse. LaunchPad Lab started by reviewing the functionality of the existing auction platform and determined that creating a refreshed brand guide would create a modern, user-friendly experience.
The LaunchPad Lab team performed extensive market research into existing digital bidding platforms to ensure the best UX patterns and logic for the online bidding process.
The new bidding application currently includes the following:
- Vehicle bidding
- Vehicle search on existing inventory
- Calculator
- Admin interface that connects Salesforce data to vehicles and auction data
In the future, LaunchPad Lab is working to develop dashboard enhancements for recommended and favorite vehicles, a picture manager for the admin team, and other features.
The Architecture
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Salesforce
As a Salesforce development agency, LaunchPad assisted Flexco in building their products on Sales Cloud and Experience Cloud, two powerful Salesforce products. All products in the Salesforce ecosystem integrate seamlessly to provide a 360-degree view of Flexco’s customers and a single source of truth for all employees.
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Heroku
Heroku, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, reduces an organization’s need for complicated hardware and foundational development to launch web and mobile apps. By leveraging Heroku as the foundation for Flexco’s digital products, we were able to reduce time-to-market.
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The Results: Streamlined Operations, Empowered Clients, and Enhanced Security
For Flexco’s core business operations, the new systems revitalized the organization’s workflow by keeping data safe and streamlined. What’s more, the systems reduced admin workload, improved data accessibility, and enhanced security.
FlexConnect provided clients with full-service offerings, giving them autonomy to create data report with ease and reducing administrative burdens.
ZoomWarehouse enabled users to make informed buying decisions with transparent vehicle information and tools that made it easy to check vehicle history. The new platform streamlined the bidding process so users could bid and make an offer with ease. With strengthened security, unverified users were unable to access private vehicle data.
These improvements reinforce Flexco’s position as a leader in the automotive remarketing industry.
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