Real-Time M&A Intelligence for 18,000+ Dealerships
Databricks
Python (Django)
React
AWS S3
Gemini
Tech Stack
Client Profile
Industry
Automotive
Region
North America
Technology
Databricks
Modernizing Leading U.S. Automotive M&A with Databricks—unifying data from 18,000+ dealerships into golden records to deliver explainable valuations, standardized forecasts, and 8-hour refreshes
Industry
Automotive
Region
North America
Technology
Databricks
Transforming a leading U.S. automotive marketplace’s web services unit—unifying systems into a high-performance platform for 60% faster sites and zero downtime.
Industry
Automotive Marketplace
Region
North America
Technology
AWS
Executive Summary
A leading North American automotive marketplaces company needed to rescue their “web services” unit that built and hosted dealer websites across multiple verticals (RVs, trucks, heavy equipment, aviation). Technical debt, instability, and poor performance stalled growth and blocked new features. Shorthills stabilized the estate, co-created a modernization roadmap with product/engineering leadership, and delivered a new, scalable stack: a high-performance dealer website platform, a multi-tenant dealer management portal, and a robust PHP integration layer—which was migrated with zero downtime. Results include 60% faster and more responsive websites, near-zero critical tickets, and a platform that enables innovation instead of hindering it.
Tech Stack
PHP
WordPress
MySQL
MongoDB
Google Analytics 4
AWS
Databricks
Python (Django)
React
AWS S3
Gemini
Tech Stack
Executive Summary
A leading U.S. automotive advisory firm struggled to turn decades of raw data from 18,000+ dealerships—spread across Polk, Helix, demographic datasets, and multiple APIs—into actionable insights. The fragmented and inconsistent data made full refreshes take over a week, delaying critical decisions like dealership valuations. Shorthills AI developed JumpIQ, an AI-powered platform that ingests this data into Databricks, creating unified “golden records” through intelligent cleaning, mapping, and merging. Advanced AI/ML models then deliver predictive analytics via a web dashboard with detailed reports and visual insights. The result: data processing dropped from over a week to 8 hours, the client gained a single accurate database, and predictive insights now support faster, more confident decisions.
Modernizing Leading U.S. Automotive M&A with Databricks—unifying data from 18,000+ dealerships into golden records to deliver explainable valuations, standardized forecasts, and 8-hour refreshes
Industry
Automotive
Region
North America
Technology
Databricks
Tech Stack
Databricks | Python (Django) | React | AWS S3 | Gemini
Executive Summary
A leading U.S. automotive advisory firm struggled to turn decades of raw data from 18,000+ dealerships—spread across Polk, Helix, demographic datasets, and multiple APIs—into actionable insights. The fragmented and inconsistent data made full refreshes take over a week, delaying critical decisions like dealership valuations. Shorthills AI developed JumpIQ, an AI-powered platform that ingests this data into Databricks, creating unified “golden records” through intelligent cleaning, mapping, and merging. Advanced AI/ML models then deliver predictive analytics via a web dashboard with detailed reports and visual insights. The result: data processing dropped from over a week to 8 hours, the client gained a single accurate database, and predictive insights now support faster, more confident decisions.
Our Solutions
Data Foundation: Lakehouse & Entity Resolution
We stood up a Databricks-powered lakehouse with medallion layers (bronze → silver → gold) and survivorship rules to reconcile conflicts. Fuzzy matching plus brand/state heuristics created a durable golden dealer record across renames, mergers, and closures—an analytics-ready backbone with end-to-end lineage.
Signals & Feature Engineering
On unified records, we built a reusable catalog of 150+ signals per dealership spanning performance, market, and macro indicators. Features are standardized across brands/states and versioned over time, so valuations, forecasts, and benchmarks stay fair and reproducible.
Valuation & Forecasting Engines
A model suite blends store performance with market signals to produce explainable valuations and forward-looking forecasts. Scenario/sensitivity views test brand, geography, and macro assumptions—accelerating buy/no-buy calls with consistent methodology.
Delivery Experience: Analyst App for M&A Workflows
A secure analytics app streamlines real M&A tasks: search/filter/compare, geospatial views, and exportable diligence summaries. Built on governed tables and shared definitions, it keeps every stakeholder aligned—from board decks to deep dives.
Challenges
7–8 years behind modern standards; sluggish performance and frequent critical issues.
Old & unstable tech stack
Taxonomy & data fragmentation
Dealer inventory structures differed widely across verticals, breaking universal features like dynamic filtering.
Inability to innovate
Rigid codebase blocked competitive features.
Automotive and equipment marketplaces that host dealer websites often inherit aging stacks, fragmented taxonomies, and brittle integrations. These issues slow pages, break shared features, and drain engineering time—stalling roadmap velocity and sales. Without a stable, scalable platform, performance, CX, and growth suffer.
What Shorthills AI Did
We stabilized years-old stack, then rebuilt the unit around a clean, scalable platform. Dealer websites moved to a high-performance WordPress setup, a multi-tenant portal centralized inventory, leads, and analytics, and a PHP integration layer kept marketplaces, dealer sites, and third-party feeds in sync. We executed a zero-downtime migration, unified messy taxonomies, and put GA4 dashboards in place—so teams could run fast without fire-fighting.
Discovery & Stabilization
We reverse-engineered the system, mapped architecture, and prioritized important fixes to keep sites up and stem dealer attrition while the rebuild proceeded.
Dealer Website Platform
We launched hundreds of customizable dealer sites on WordPress, leveraging custom/third-party plugins for rich UX and faster delivery, measured with Lighthouse/PageSpeed.
Multi-Tenant Dealer Management Portal
We built a centralized backend for inventory, lead management, and analytics—with GA4 dashboards—which became the operational “nervous system” for the unit.
Integration Layer & Zero-Downtime Migration
Our PHP web-services layer synchronized dealer portals, dealer sites, marketplaces, and third-party feeds across MySQL (platform) and MongoDB (inventory/leads). We hence executed a meticulously planned, zero-downtime migration from failing infrastructure.
Overview
A leading automotive advisory firm that provides M&A and investment insights for the U.S. car dealership market struggled to leverage its raw data, coming from over 18,000 dealerships spanning decades. Each record had roughly 150 fields drawn from Polk, Helix, demographic and population datasets and other open sources and APIs. This had issues of inconsistent formats, missing common identifiers that prevented easy merging, and large gaps. These problems slowed extraction of actionable insights: full data refreshes took more than a week and blocked timely, strategic decisions such as dealership valuations.
To resolve the client's data challenges, Shorthills AI developed JumpIQ, an AI-powered platform that ingests and processes raw data from Polk, Helix, and other open APIs directly into Databricks. A robust data engineering pipeline was built for intelligent merging (using techniques like fuzzy matching and address normalization), cleaning, mapping, and formatting to create a unified “golden record” for each dealership. On this refined data foundation, advanced AI/ML models were deployed for predictive analytics, including revenue forecasting, sales efficiency, dealership valuation, and performance scoring—all accessible through a web-based dashboard offering detailed analytical reports and visual insights.
As a result, the client reduced data processing time from over a week to just 8 hours, gained a single clean and accurate database, and obtained significantly stronger predictive insights that enable faster, more confident strategic decisions.
Executive Summary
A leading North American automotive marketplaces company needed to rescue their “web services” unit that built and hosted dealer websites across multiple verticals (RVs, trucks, heavy equipment, aviation). Technical debt, instability, and poor performance stalled growth and blocked new features. Shorthills stabilized the estate, co-created a modernization roadmap with product/engineering leadership, and delivered a new, scalable stack: a high-performance dealer website platform, a multi-tenant dealer management portal, and a robust PHP integration layer—which was migrated with zero downtime. Results include 60% faster and more responsive websites, near-zero critical tickets, and a platform that enables innovation instead of hindering it.
Tech Stack
PHP
WordPress
MySQL
MongoDB
Google Analytics 4
AWS
Outcomes
A leading North American automotive marketplace’s web-services unit was slowed by an outdated stack, fragmented data, and constant breakages. With Shorthills AI’s modernization, dealer sites now load ~60% faster (Lighthouse/PageSpeed), and the cutover to the new platform landed with zero downtime. Critical tickets dropped to near zero, replacing late-night fixes. A unified taxonomy restored shared features like dynamic filters and search across verticals, improving buyer experience and dealer conversion. The multi-tenant portal gives teams one place to manage inventory, leads, and GA4 analytics, so decisions are data-driven. Product and engineering can ship new features again, sales can confidently market the unit, and the platform is finally an engine for growth—not a bottleneck.
60% website performance improvement
Faster, more responsive sites verified via Lighthouse/PageSpeed.
Zero-downtime migration & higher stability
Seamless cutover and drastic reduction in critical tickets and operational overhead.
Better CX and renewed innovation
Dealers get reliable, feature-rich sites and analytics; product teams can ship new features.
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