A couple of months ago, CDK Global was victim to a cyberattack, prompting them to halt most of their services for 14 days while mitigating the risk.
SD Digital’s Intelligent Automation Team closely monitored the outage due to our automotive dealership clients, for whom we implemented new vehicle inventory management solutions.
Impact on Business Processes
The outage resulted in a significant backlog of information that needed entry into their Dealer Management System (DMS), including inventory management and financial reporting. Focusing on new vehicle invoices, a vehicle does not appear in the dealer’s website inventory until the invoice is entered in the DMS. Until the backlog of invoices was processed, the car inventory was inaccurate. Such discrepancies can negatively impact sales, especially for customers who rely on website inventory while seeking specific vehicles. Similar scenarios of degraded processes with downstream operational impacts were evident across other business areas.
Once the CDK service was restored, operations weren’t immediately back to business as usual. It was discovered that some third-party integrations with CDK were halted during the outage. For example, Honda stopped providing dealerships with baseline information based on VIN. This created additional manual inputs for several dealerships.
The Benefits of Automation
By having automated solutions in place, our clients were positioned to quickly eliminate their backlogs. As soon as notification was received that CDK’s services were online, the automation was invoked to begin processing records that had been queued throughout the outage. Even with the process changes from the broken integrations, the backlog was quickly eliminated, leaving only a handful of exceptions to be manually reconciled.
Although under unfortunate circumstances, this instance highlighted some of the core benefits of automation:
- Automation should be leveraged to remove process bottlenecks and avoid downstream impacts. By uploading new invoices into the DMS, the sales process is unblocked, creating the opportunity for improved revenue generation and more efficient cash flow.
- Automation is a valuable tool for responsibly scaling. By implementing automation, organizations can handle irregular volumes over time, without impacting resource allocation. Whether there are invoices for a single day or multiple weeks of backlog, automation can handle the workload without needing to scale resources up or down.
- Automation can be tailored to your current or future business needs. Processes and applications are bound to change over time, so having an automation platform that is robust enough to adapt quickly is an invaluable resource to any organization.
- Digital workforces operate 24/7/365. Given that notice of CDK’s service restoration was received in the afternoon of July 2nd, resource scheduling could have been difficult with the end of standard working hours quickly approaching and an upcoming holiday. Deploying automation resolved this scenario and ensured employees could enjoy their evening and holiday plans.
Lessons Learned
The cyberattack on CDK Global and the subsequent outage highlights the impact automation can have on business operations. This incident serves as a powerful reminder that intelligent automation is not only a tool for optimizing daily operations but also an essential component of an effective recovery strategy. By leveraging automation, businesses can ensure continuity, scalability, and resilience in the face of unforeseen challenges.
No matter where you are on your journey with automation, SD Digital is here to help you. When we talk to our customers, they tell us that they appreciate our thorough and business-focused approach to identifying the right problems to solve before solving them. Contact us today to accelerate AND derisk your automation journey with a FREE process discovery workshop.
About SD Digital
SD Digital helps organizations translate technology to transformative change and realize the best version of themselves. With a forward-thinking cap and digital lens, we empower organizations to realize the art of the possible with the power of digital through business-focused and technology-enabled solutions, built on an unwavering commitment to practicality, speed to market and the user experience.
Learn more on our dedicated Schneider Downs Digital page or contact the team directly at [email protected].
