A vehicle key for each vehicle is regularly "in circulation" in order, for example, to carry out workshop visits and vehicle reconditioning or to enable sales staff and potential customers to carry out extensive inspections or test drives. While the first keys were freely accessible to salesmen, mechanics or vehicle reconditioners in a commercially available key box, the second keys were securely stored in the company safe. However, in day-to-day business, it happened again and again that individual vehicle keys could not be found at first after inspections or test drives, were only returned days later, or were lost altogether. "In this way, around 20 keys are lost every year in our Pforzheim branch alone. In addition to the unnecessary costs of several hundred euros per replacement key, it was particularly annoying when we could only give a customer one vehicle key when delivering his vehicle and we first had to have a duplicate key made at the manufacturer," remembers Jessica Luft, dispatcher at the Autohaus Walter Pforzheim branch. Every single search process and key loss regularly put the working atmosphere as well as customer confidence to the test, so that in 2017 the management finally decided to reorganize the internal key management from scratch.
Unreliable documentation and history
There was no documentation of the withdrawals, let alone IT-supported management of the vehicles – or only in rudimentary form. "Although we were able to see individual repair procedures from the vehicle documentation and thus which mechanic worked on the vehicle when. Whether the key then went back to the seller or was handed over to the vehicle reconditioner, however, could no longer be conclusively traced from this," Jessica Luft continued. "As a makeshift, we had initially created an Excel list in which we had entered all the keys or. Have documented the current withdrawals and current returns. In practice, however, this approach did not prove to be pragmatic, since on the one hand there was no traceable history and on the other hand daily backups from the previous day were regularly restored, which made this approach very error-prone in practice."
Production launch without lead time
After an initial evaluation phase and at the instigation of the management, Jessica Luft and her team asked a colleague at Porsche to show them what they thought was a suitable solution that had already been in successful use there for some time. "We had a good feeling right from the start after the presentation – Taskworld simply brought everything with it already as standard. Not only did it meet our requirements for simple, reliable key management that can be tracked at any time, but the flexible application options and ease of use meant that we were able to start immediately after the 10-day test phase without any time-consuming training or necessary adjustments," says Jessica Luft, who has since been managing the key management in Taskworld as administrator.