There are all sorts of nuanced intricacies that come with running a car dealership. Perhaps the most important thing that you’ll need to deal with, and often the trickiest, is security, given both the value and relative precarity of the assets that you’ll be dealing with.
To effectively manage your approach to security in such a complex setting, it’s often best to break it down into smaller parts. Here, we focus specifically on dealer plates, looking at how you can keep them safe and secure throughout your day-to-day operations.
Inventorise
To protect any kind of asset, you first need to know what it is that you’re dealing with. As a result, a vital first step will be to conduct a thorough inventory of all your dealer plates, so that you know exactly what it is that you need to keep safe and secure.
Check that all the plates are in a single location before you start, looking in all potential storage locations, and on cars as well. It’s easy to miss one, especially if it could be out on the roads on a test drive while you’re doing your checks.
Physical control
When the plates aren’t being used, they need to be kept in a secure, organised location such as a plate locker from KEYper Systems. These kinds of storage solutions allow for specific controls to be placed on individual plates, rather than just providing a single secure locker into which everything is thrown at random.
With these kinds of systems in place, you can control who exactly can access individual plates, and log exactly who takes out any specific plate at any given time. This means that if a plate were to go missing, with a quick check of the digitised log book, you’ll be able to get to the bottom of things.
Tracking
It’s important to keep your dealer plates under lock and key whenever they’re not in use, but at some point, they will need to be taken out and put on a car. Rather than just hoping for the best, it’s vital that the plates are still subject to some kind of control while they’re out and about.
Luckily, there are plenty of advanced solutions that allow you to track the plates with special tags, meaning you will always be able to locate them if necessary.
By combining this solution with some sort of advanced key control cabinet, you can streamline your operations, making things easier for your employees while also increasing security across the board.
Managing security in dealership settings can be tricky at first, but it becomes substantially easier when you have access to the right tools. It’s important to first understand the security threats that you might be facing, and then look for solutions that cater to those threats as specifically as possible. By taking this approach, you’ll be able to maximise the efficacy of your security investments, while simultaneously conducting a series of practically effective risk assessments.
