One of the most common questions we get when someone wants to bring Autopix into their workflow is, “what does onboarding looking like?”
Rolling out software like this across one dealership is one thing, but rolling it out across twelve can quickly become an organisational nightmare.
But the failure and struggle is rarely technical.
The system works, the licences are paid, and eleven sites use it. Yet site seven quietly went back to the old way in week three, and nobody escalated it – and now the group discovers six months later that its listing standard is not actually a standard.
Autopix has a tight process to alleviate problems like these, and onboards dealerships across Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, from single sites to groups running several locations under one account – and the pattern that separates a clean rollout from a messy one is simple.
The groups that succeed treat the first site as a test rather than a launch, and they decide what “working” means before anyone downloads anything.
This is a practical onboarding playbook for the person responsible for that rollout.
A multi-location rollout works best in four phases:
Each phase exists to answer one question before the next one starts.
Definition answers what good output looks like for this group. The pilot answers whether the process survives contact with a real forecourt. Refinement answers what has to change before other sites see it. Waves answer whether the refined process travels to teams who were not in the room when it was designed.
A realistic shape for a group of ten to fifteen sites is two to four weeks of definition, three to four weeks of pilot, one to two weeks of refinement, then waves of three to five sites at roughly two weeks each.
Most of the work is the group’s rather than Autopix’s, which is the part that surprises people.
Two of these decide whether the rollout works.
The group project lead has to be a real person with authority to stop a wave, not a committee.
And every site needs a named champion before it goes live, because a location without one is a location where nobody owns the problem when the first thing goes wrong.
Most rollouts start at the pilot. Starting one phase earlier is what makes the pilot interpretable.
Write down what a finished listing image set looks like for your group. Which angles, how many images, which background, where the logo sits, how number plates are handled, what happens with damage close-ups.
If twelve sites currently answer those questions twelve different ways, the rollout is not introducing software. It is introducing a standard, and the software is how the standard gets enforced.
Take a baseline. Pull the current listing images from three sites, including your best and your weakest. Note how long a car currently takes from arrival to live listing, and who does the photography today.
Without this, you will have no way to tell whether the rollout worked, and every later conversation becomes a matter of opinion.
Agree on the success measures now. Days from arrival to listing, images published per car, and consistency across sites are the three that hold up.
Pick the ones you can actually measure from systems you already have.
Then choose the tooling against that standard, rather than choosing the tool and discovering the standard afterwards.
You are ready for a pilot when the standard is written, the baseline is recorded, and one site has agreed to go first.
The pilot exists to find the things nobody predicted. It is not a demonstration, and it should not be run by the person most enthusiastic about the change.
Choose a representative site, not the best one. The best-run location in the group will make any process look successful. Pick a site with ordinary staffing, ordinary weather exposure, and a mix of stock.
If it works there, it travels.
Run it on real inventory for at least three weeks. A week is enough to test the software and not enough to test the habit. The questions worth answering are behavioural:
Does the photographer still follow the shot sequence on a busy Friday, does the process survive when the usual person is on holiday, and where in the yard do cars actually get photographed when it is raining?
Log every friction point as it happens. A shared document, updated by the site champion, not a debrief from memory at the end.
The list is the output of the pilot.
Practical note from Autopix onboardings: the physical shooting spot is the single most underestimated part of a pilot. A site with no agreed location for photography will produce inconsistent images regardless of which tool it uses, because the background changes every time.
You are ready to refine when the site has run its normal weekly volume through the new process for three consecutive weeks, and the friction log has stopped producing new entries.
This phase is short, and it is the one groups skip. Skipping it means every site inherits the pilot’s unresolved problems, multiplied.
Work through the friction log and sort it into three piles.
Things to fix in the tooling, such as backgrounds, logo placement, image counts, and integration settings.
Things to fix in the process, such as who shoots, when, and where – and things to fix in the training material, which is usually everything the pilot site had to work out for itself.
Then produce the group template: one written standard, one short training document, and one checklist that fits on a wall. If the training material is longer than two pages, the process is too complicated to survive a wave.
Finally, decide your pilot site’s role going forward.
The site that ran the pilot has the only staff in the group with real experience of the change, and they are more credible to the next sites than any central function.
Focus on waves of three to five sites, rather than everything at once, for one reason: a wave is small enough that you can still fix a problem before it reaches the whole network.
Sequence by readiness, not by size or geography. Sites with an engaged champion and a manager who wants this go early.
Sites with an ongoing DMS change, a management vacancy, or a refurbishment go late.
Set up the account and assets before the site is told to start. Backgrounds, logo, image standards and any integrations should be configured centrally so a new location opens the app to a working setup rather than a configuration task.
Autopix accounts run with unlimited users and no per-seat fees, so adding a location or a new staff member is an account action rather than a procurement one, which removes the usual licence bottleneck between waves.
Keep training short and local. One session, at the site, with the standard demonstrated on a real car in the yard rather than on slides.
Then one follow-up in week two, which is when the actual questions arrive.
Check output in week one of every wave. Someone centrally should look at the first fifty published images from each new site against the standard.
Problems found in week one are corrections.
Problems found in month three are habits.
Communicate the reason, not the instruction. A site told to change its photography process resists.
A site shown the difference between its own listing images and the group standard, on a results page where its cars sit next to competitors’ cars, tends not to.
You are ready for the next wave when the previous one is meeting the standard without central chasing.
Adoption does not end at go-live.
It ends when the new way is the only way anyone at the site remembers.
Three things hold it in place:
A quarterly image audit, which takes an hour and compares a sample of listings across all sites.
A named owner of the standard, so that changes go through one person rather than drifting site by site.
And the process built into new-starter onboarding, because staff turnover is what quietly unwinds a rollout eighteen months later.
Review the baseline you took in phase 0 at three months and at six. If the number of days from arrival to listing has not moved, the problem is usually not the software. It is somewhere else in the process, and you now have the data to find out where.
Most of this list is organisational. That is the honest summary of a multi-site rollout: the software is the easy part.
Autopix covers the capture and editing half of the process.
The app runs a standard photo guide so staff at different sites shoot the same sequence, and both Express and Plus plans include custom floors and backgrounds, logo placement and mirror reflection removal, which is what makes a group’s output look like one group rather than twelve.
Express is fully automated and returns images in minutes, which suits everyday volume. Plus adds professional retouching and human quality control on the cars where presentation matters more.
For a group, the useful part is that the choice is per car rather than per site, so one location does not have to buy a higher tier for the whole year to cover a handful of vehicles.
Integrations with Billink, Carweb, Drive and Wayke move finished images into the listing workflow rather than leaving each site to download and re-upload files.
What Autopix does not do is decide your standard, run your change management, or make a site champion care. That part stays with the group.
For the pilot itself, three free test orders are available on real cars, which is enough to check output quality on your own stock before any commitment.
Before you evaluate a single tool, write down what a finished listing image set should look like for your group and pull the current images from your best and weakest site to sit next to it.
That comparison usually settles the business case on its own.
Then pick one representative site and run a real pilot on real stock. Autopix gives you three free orders to test output on your own cars first, and the camera settings guide covers the capture standard your pilot site should be working to.
