Carsales in global ERP, CRM overhaul

Carsales is shifting its entire international operations onto standardised ERP and CRM platforms after successfully deploying new Oracle and Salesforce systems in Australia.

The vehicle classifieds business today revealed it had rolled out the new Oracle NetSuite ERP and Salesforce CRM to the local core Carsales operation during the just-finished first half of its financial year 2018.

The rollout appears to be directed at supporting Carsales' push into international markets.

The company has been slowly building its presence overseas in the past few years, and last October revealed big forecasts for revenue opportunities at its operations in South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

The two new core IT platforms will create a "single source of truth for customer and financial data globally" once deployed to Carsales' other adjacent and international businesses over the coming months.

The "scalable, global architecture" will hook into Carsales' proprietary technology - like its Cyclops image recognition tool and Ryvuss search engine - to give the business "increased agility to respond to technology and market changes and corporate activity", Carsales said.

The Salesforce platform specifically will give Carsales improved AI and data analytics capabilities to help it deliver "the products and services of today and tomorrow".

Carsales sees AI as a "key pillar" for its operations in the future; CIO Jason Blackman told iTnews last year that the technology promised "improvements in fraud detection, automation, personalisation and recommendation engines" as well as "as yet unknown features that will significantly improve customer experiences".

Carsales has been contacted for detail on its previous ERP and CRM platforms.

The firm today reported half-yearly net profit growth of 27 percent to $60.2 milion, and 12 percent revenue growth to $200 million.

More to come