Onboarding a dealer took a fortnight. The order took days more.

The dealer was ready to sell. The paperwork was not

Onboarding a new dealer took 10 to 15 days. Not because anything about the decision was hard, but because the application was re-keyed by hand, verified by hand, and then walked through approval steps that ran one after another rather than together.

The cost of that landed on the dealer, not on the process that caused it. A dealer waiting a fortnight for activation is a dealer not selling, and the delays did not stop once they were live.

• Deliveries ran 3–5 days late, against disconnected workflows that gave no one a single view of where an order actually was.
• Inquiries went more than 24 hours without a response, which turned ordinary questions into escalations.
• Dealer engagement sat roughly 15% lower than it should have, and the communication gaps were the reason.

Each of those was treated as its own problem by its own team. None of them was, and that is why fixing them one at a time had not worked.

The onboarding queue was a symptom. The disconnection was the cause

Manual data entry is the visible failure, and automating the keystrokes would have shortened the ten days without touching the rest of it: the order that no one could trace, the case that lived in a different system from the relationship it belonged to, the question routed to whoever happened to see it.

So the work was scoped to the dealer lifecycle rather than to the onboarding form: application through approval, order through delivery, issue through resolution, and the relationship that runs underneath all of them. One record of the dealer, visible to everyone who touches them.

One lifecycle across Salesforce, with cases where cases belong

Sales Cloud carries dealer and relationship management, with the approval workflows configured to run in parallel where they had previously queued. Applications enter the CRM directly rather than being transcribed into it, which removed the data-entry step and the errors that came with it.

Case management stayed in ServiceNow and was integrated rather than rebuilt, so dealer issues sit in the system already built for support workflows while remaining visible against the dealer record. Chatter carries the internal collaboration that used to happen in email threads nobody else could see.

Experience Cloud gives dealers their own way in (application progress, order activity, open cases) instead of an inquiry and a wait. Loyalty Management tracks engagement over time, which is what turns a relationship into something that can be managed rather than merely reported on.

What the business can now watch is the lifecycle itself: onboarding applications and their approval progress, active cases and their resolution status, current order turnaround, engagement performance, and which inquiries are still pending. Onboarding time fell by half, order processing by 40%, and dealer engagement and annual sales rose 25%.