Company: EMKAY Inc., Itasca, IL
Company Description: Emkay is a provider of vehicle financing and management solutions to businesses throughout North America. Founded in 1946 and the 2nd oldest fleet management company in the nation, our focus is on operational excellence. As the industry’s only privately held, employee-owned company, our unique ownership enables a special personal pride in servicing our customers.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business Innovation of the Year - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: EMKAY Refreshed the World of Remarketing

Tell the story about this nominated achievement since January 1 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

EMKAY’s a national B2B leader of fleet management services helping nearly 1000 customers in North America with over 100,000 vehicles under management. We’ve become well known for being one of the most innovative and technologically driven companies in our industry today.  

In “Remarketing” (selling off-lease vehicles) we already enjoy a competitive advantage from our hands-on approach and strategy. Our customized processes resulted in EMKAY leading the industry with an overall resale price of over 3% better than competition as reviewed independently by Adesa Analytical Services.  

So, when we had the opportunity to take our current process further, we jumped at the idea. 

Most everyone has heard of ‘Carfax’ – the report on used vehicle’s - showing nothing bad has happened. Imagine if you could see more. Imagine seeing every maintenance transaction (or lack there of)? 

That’s exactly what EMKAY did. We created an innovative advantage by providing a detailed maintenance history in advance to any potential buyer, with every vehicle that we sent through auctions. To date, EMKAY is the only North American reseller to offer this unique service. We then branded each vehicle with window decals indicating to buyers it’s an EMKAY vehicle and has received proper maintenance and repairs resulting in high quality, desired used vehicles.  

We then took this a step further, infusing technology with our unique process and created our website EMKAYSELECT.com. This site made the process even more efficient for buyers, by housing all the same data via our website. This enabled buyers to research prior to auction day, the vehicles they wanted based  on this advanced data provided. This not only helped them, it helped our customers by creating additional action in bidding, driving up the price – supply/demand at it’s finest.  

Innovation didn’t stop there.  

EMKAY innovated even further. We then created the industry’s only remarketing consignor app. The mobile app not only allows buyers to review maintenance  history in advance, but shows exactly when and where that vehicle is expected  to go through auction, saving time, money, and resources, all while making it  convenient. On the flip side, this gains more interest and increased buy prices by .5%-1.2% while reducing sell time by 1-3 days. To top that, several alert features on the app notify buyers, such as line run alerts. Being the first of its kind in the industry, the app has experienced a lot of traffic and we’ve received overwhelming positive feedback.  

As quoted “The EMKAY Select app puts FULL vehicle history in the palm of your hand. It’s simple-use scan the VIN and couldn’t be any easier! That’s industry-leading technology that you can trust... best of all it’s absolutely free.”  Luke Honaker from Adesa. 

The results of our innovations have increased visibility of our clients off-lease vehicles which led to an increase in percentage sales of 1.1% from 3% to 4.1% as prepared by independent studies. Our clients experienced even higher returns and we have found that by implementing our EMKAY Select App, our employees have become more efficient as well.

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader of this nominated organization:

Christopher Tepas joined EMKAY in 1999. Chris earned his degree from Arizona State University and professional design training at Art Institute California-San Francisco. Tepas was promoted to VP Sales in 2003, EVP Sales and Marketing in 2006, and EVP Client Services & Marketing in 2009. Tepas has helped spearhead EMKAY’s team to earn several awards such as Stevies Front-Line Customer Service Team-of-the-Year, Customer Service Institute Top Small Company, Info500 “Top IT Companies U.S.”, and Winner Stevies Customer Service Department-of-the-Year.

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