While not a true bank, the company operates like a financial firm because it finances more than 99 percent of the cars it sells.

 

“More than 99 percent of our sales are finance sales, so our customers are really shopping for financing as much as they are shopping for a car,” says Mark Sauder, executive vice president and chief financial officer at DriveTime. “This means that an integral part of our service is getting the customer into the right car as it relates both to the sales price and what they can afford in terms of down payment, interest rate, and financing term.”

 

Because many of its customers have incomplete credit histories, DriveTime has an internally developed Excel-based system called DeskIt for credit scoring and matching customers with automobiles, down payments and other factors based on internal credit scores.

 

“Many of our customers don’t have a traditional credit score that can be accessed, and we’ve found that even for those who have credit scores, we can make better decisions using our own risk models that we’ve developed over the years based upon our experience,” says Sauder. “We use our internally-generated credit score to help us find the best match for our customers in terms of vehicle, down payment, interest rate, loan term, and other variables.”

 

Sales associates use the score to search a database of all the cars that are available throughout the company’s inventory, so that customers can consider automobiles that are available from other DriveTime dealerships within the same city or metropolitan market. Although the application worked well, as more and more dealerships began to use the system, there was a wider database to search and DriveTime felt it needed to scale better and to update to a friendlier interface.

 

DeskIt Plus was created using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, a set of tools to help a software team collaborate and communicate more efficiently, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, a collaboration server that offers a number of functions including source code control, work-item and issue tracking, integrated process guidance, project health, and status reporting. The team also used the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

 

The data store, which had been loaded into an Excel spreadsheet from the AS/400, was upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition database software running on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. Team Foundation Server was used to create the Windows SharePoint Services portal to support development.

 

Visual Studio Team System unit testing and automated Web tests were used to improve quality in the application, as well as to provide a clear path to continuous integration, with the potential to run unit tests on check-in. Meanwhile, integrating the solution with SQL Server provided the company with the scalability it needed to grow well into the future.