Onewater marine, LLC

THE COMPANY

OneWater Marine acquires and controls top marine retail dealerships across North America. They have an aggressive expansion strategy and are dedicated to purchasing and operating dealerships while offering a variety of acquisition models for dealer owners, operators and principals. OWM offers an attractive opportunity for owners and/or principals to exit their role in operations while securing their future through the acquisition.

OneWater Marine has unified some of the top-ranked dealerships in the industry. By doing so, they have leveraged economies of scale to improve cash flow, offer greater stability and operate with financial strength

These notable credentials earned OWM the title of “2016’s Dealer of the Year” in Boating Industry Magazine.

CHALLENGES

OWM had recently employed a dynamic and ambitious expansion policy that brought on over 40 dealer locations. The enterprise was utilizing a method where multiple sales managers were using google spreadsheets as a sort of “executive dashboard” for updating deals valued in the millions. This quickly became a problem for their executives as critical information on day-to-day sales was being inputted with no real organization or leads referencing.

The above challenges were coupled with the fact that an industry-specific marine dealer management software, “Legacy,” was storing their data in an antiquated API, leaving much room for human error.

SOLUTION

We leveraged Microsoft Azure, specifically Azure Functions, to extract the data from Lightspeed and store it in the cloud, creating a custom data warehouse. We then imported that into a reporting database where we built a user interface with ASP.NET Core to view the database in a similar fashion to the initial google sheet in order to allow familiarity for the users and managers.

The data is linked to a custom executive dashboard and reporting system. We implemented Microsoft Office 365 in order to utilize current logins for authentication. This allowed us to leverage current single sign-on solutions using Azure Active Directory through Office 365. Since we did not have to reinvent the wheel in order for managers and executives to sign into a private-facing dashboard, we saved time and money for our developers and our clients.

RESULTS

The custom dashboard we created gave OWM abilities that they did not have previously and helped to enhance their business. They can now filter their data by dealerships and dates and they can see their data in new ways. For example they can now see aggregates on boat brands and get new insights into their data and sales. The custom dashboard also gave OWM the ability to have deeper access to data. They now have the ability to go back and look at past data, past months and make comparisons and projections.

OWM executives now have access to data that is updated on a schedule so they know exactly when the information will be there. We have helped allow for store managers to focus on selling instead of data entry. This has allowed our client to achieve more sales and opportunities.

By automating a process from API to executive dashboard, with a data warehouse in the middle, we saved resources, bringing our client the most value possible.

OWM was so pleased with our executive dashboard we were then hired to build an integrated CRM.