Asbury Automotive Group has converted 70% of its 158 dealerships to Tekion’s cloud-based dealer management system and plans to finish the job by October. The numbers coming out of the stores already running on the new platform tell a story that CDK Global probably doesn’t want to hear.
CEO Dan Clara laid it out on an earnings call July 28. Stores that have been on Tekion for at least five months grew average units per salesperson by 12% in June. Dollars per technician climbed 10%.
The former Jim Koons Automotive stores in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, which have been live the longest at roughly a year, posted a 14.2% increase in average units per sales manager and a 15.2% jump in units per F&I manager. Those are not soft metrics. Those are the kinds of gains that make other megadealers pick up the phone.
Asbury piloted Tekion in January 2024, months before CDK’s cybersecurity meltdown shut down swaths of the retail auto industry in June and July of that year. The timing was fortunate but the decision predated the crisis. Asbury was already looking for a way out.
The core argument Clara made is deceptively simple. Having every operation on a single cloud platform eliminates the friction of technicians and staff logging into multiple systems that may not talk to each other. That friction eats hours. Hours eat margin.
Running two DMS platforms simultaneously cost Asbury $1.2 million in pretax expenses in the second quarter alone. Once Tekion is fully deployed, that line item disappears. It is not a massive sum for a company of Asbury’s size, but it is dead money, and Clara clearly wants it off the books.
The Tekion rollout is happening against a backdrop of strategic positioning. Clara told analysts the company is preparing for a wave of off-lease vehicles expected to hit the market through 2027. Asbury plans to chase used-car volume aggressively, and Clara was unusually specific about the math.
For every additional 500 used cars sold, Asbury can absorb a $200 to $250 per-unit reduction in gross profit and still maintain healthy per-vehicle returns. That kind of stress testing suggests a company that expects to compete on throughput, not just margin. The Tekion system is the infrastructure play that makes that possible.
Tekion, based in Pleasanton, California, has been positioning itself as the modern alternative to legacy DMS providers for years. Landing Asbury, with its 158 rooftops and the $3 billion Koons acquisition folded in, is the kind of reference account that validates the pitch. Clara’s willingness to share granular performance data on an earnings call amounts to a public endorsement that Tekion’s sales team could not have bought.
CDK Global, still dealing with the reputational fallout from its 2024 outage, now watches one of its former anchor clients broadcast efficiency gains on a competitor’s platform. The DMS business has long been sticky because switching costs are brutal. Asbury is proving that a megadealer can absorb those costs and come out ahead, which changes the calculus for every large group still weighing the move.
Clara acknowledged the transition is not painless. He cited a break-in period of up to six months for stores to learn the new system. That is real disruption, real lost productivity in the short term.
But the stores that have cleared that window are posting double-digit efficiency gains. And Asbury still has 30% of its network left to convert, with an October deadline looming.
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