Dealers could add another £250 profit on each used car and increase stock turn by a third, claim the developers of a new business intelligence system launched in the UK this month.

Autovista, a Finnish company founded 20 years ago, has already signed up one retail group and a car supermarket to its internet-based BIRT (business intelligence reporting tool) and hopes to have 15-20 groups using the system within a year.

BIRT is a statistical model that calculates prices for individual cars and the selling time. Instead of 30-, 60- or 90-day stocking polices, described by Autovista managing director Leo Lucas as “outdated”, BIRT tells dealers which cars they need, the price they need to buy at, where to sell the car (useful for groups), when to sell it and for how much.

Lucas claims the error of margin is less than 1%.

“BIRT helps dealers in a scientific manner to realize stock optimization,” he says.

Mikael Teerilahti, Autovista founder, adds: “There are two issues – dealers either sell cars too quickly and too cheaply, or they hold on to them for too long and have to sell them very cheaply.”

BIRT uses Cap codes to identify every car in the market, including engines, specification and options. Further data is collected from the dealer and is added to the system to get individual prices and stock times.

The tool can link to dealer management systems to pick up dealers’ historical costings to predict the margin they will make on each car.

“It gives dealers a head start by enabling them to understand which cars will make the biggest margin and which cars they should sell quickly,” says Lucas.

Autovista is talking to a number of partners who will market and sell its product in the UK. Solmotive, recent winner of the AM Award for e-commerce, has already agreed terms.

“When these partners are agreed we will set up an office in the UK to offer product support – probably in the summer,” says Lucas.