New York
CNN
–
A CDK Global system outage has affected nearly every aspect of the Mazda dealership in Seekonk, Massachusetts, where Ryan Callahan is general sales manager. He says it won’t be a simple fix.
“The financial impact it will have directly on us will take months, if not years, to correct,” Callahan said.
Car buyers and dealers are grappling with the retail software provider’s shutdown, which has left nearly 15,000 car dealerships across North America struggling to provide customer service and scrambling to find temporary solutions analog to operate.
CDK says it is working to restore its systems and expects to have them back online in a few days, but in the meantime, customers and dealership employees remain plagued by long wait times, delays — and missed opportunities for money earned or saved.
Tom McParland, owner of Automatic Consulting, a national car buying service, said the outage is affecting customers because they have fewer dealers to choose from.
“It reduces their ability to reach a deal,” he said. “It limits the customer’s leverage.”
Some dealers also cannot apply factory rebates without CDK software, so customers may miss out on money-saving offers. For customers looking to buy a car, McParland suggested casting a wide net and shopping outside their local market to find the best price.
Midway Automotive uses a CDK product to register cars with the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Owner Michael Deveney says after closing Wednesday, the dealership began sending customers to their local RMV office to register their cars in person after purchase.
“That was until Thursday. Then customers started being told (the RMV) wasn’t doing any walk-ins,” he said. “They were probably getting flooded with customers and started turning people away.”
Deveney said one customer became increasingly concerned because he couldn’t register his car. “Getting an appointment can take three or four days, and in that time they’re not really able to drive their cars,” he added.
About 30 miles north in Lynn, Katelyn Salvato says she hasn’t been able to register a vehicle since last Tuesday. Salvato works as a title clerk for Pride Motor Group, registering cars for three dealerships.
“Today … I sent 21 registrations to be done manually at the Massachusetts RMV,” she said, adding that the RMV will not accept transactions from dealership employees. “Transactions must be canceled within the designated hours (10am to 3pm), and the runner cannot wait for them.”
Callahan echoed those concerns. Under normal circumstances, the CDK software allows the seller to register a vehicle almost instantly, but now the process faces huge delays.
“Our remote registration system has become useless without CDK to talk to. We’ve had to send a runner with registrations to the DMV to race in packages, taking days where it used to take hours,” Callahan said in an interview with CNN.
If a vehicle is not registered within seven days of purchase, the state penalizes both the seller and the customer.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation, which oversees the state’s RMV, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Service and sales go hand in hand
Dealers and service workers who spoke to CNN say they’ve been using pen and paper to process purchases, which has dragged out the time it takes to buy a car, according to Scott Campbell, a salesperson at Capital City Buick GMC in Berlin, Vermont. . He estimates that wait times have doubled or tripled.
Nicolas, who declined to give his full name because he was unsure of his employer’s stance on speaking to the media, is a clerk in the parts department of a Porsche dealership in Los Angeles. He said he has used “a mix of pen and paper, Excel sheets and extra care on each invoice” since the shutdown.
Since many retailers use CDK products to manage inventory, Nicolas said his department is now forced to manually record inventory items, which significantly slows down their work. “We don’t have a clear view of the stock and have to do regular inventory on our most used parts,” he added.
But sometimes analog solutions are not enough.
Some buyers and repair customers tell CNN they have experienced long delays.
Don Aycock told CNN he drove 90 miles round trip from his home to a car dealership in Clay County, Florida, to buy a new Buick on Thursday, the day after CDK closed. He told CNN he was able to buy the car but was unable to sign over the title.
“We got a call from them today that we can come next Thursday to sign the title papers and get a permanent license plate,” he said, noting it will be another long round trip. .
In San Diego — where temperatures have reached 90 degrees in recent days — Robbie Jacob and his wife tried to make an appointment at a Kia service center to fix their car’s broken air conditioning unit. Jacob said the center told them it was unable to service the car, citing the CDK cyber incident, as there were no appointments available and all walk-ins were suspended until next week.
CDK Global is not the only management system used by vendors, and successive cyber incidents affecting the company have also put their competitors on high alert.
Cox Automotive, which operates Dealertrack and VinSolutions software systems to manage paperwork and customer service, told CNN it temporarily stopped integrating its systems with CDK after the outage “as a precaution to prioritize safety and security for our customers”.
“As we actively support our customers to continue to run their business, we created a secure microsite that our customers are actively using now to access support and guidance, workarounds and actions they can take while CDK systems are not available,” the company said. .
Tekion, another software company used by vendors, said it has “seen an increase in requests from merchants in light of the recent CDK incident.”
And other industry experts told CNN that switching from one system to another isn’t something retailers can do on a whim. Businesses are often locked into a multi-year contract with a software provider. Changing software also means training employees, making it a lengthy process.
Meanwhile, Asbury Automotive Group, one of America’s largest aftermarket retailers and service providers, warned investors on Monday that the CDK outage has hurt its business and it is unclear when it will end. Rival Group1 Automotive said CDK believed the outage would be resolved within days, not weeks, but it was unclear how much financial damage the company faced as a result.