Automotive Dealerships
Managed IT, network segmentation, and security for Pacific Northwest dealerships. Built around the systems your store already depends on.
A DMS the vendor wants wired straight into your network. F&I platforms that are cloud-only and down to the minute on deal day. OEM portals with access requirements that change every program year. Card payments in the showroom, the service lane, and the parts counter, each with PCI exposure your auditor will ask about. And a network where nobody can say with confidence what is actually talking to what. That last part is usually where we start.
Tell us what’s breaking →The DMS outage on the last Saturday of the month, with deals stacked up and the vendor help line quoting a four-hour callback. The F&I workstation that lost connectivity mid-signing because the guest Wi-Fi and the showroom floor share an access point nobody remembers installing. The OEM audit that asked how vendor access to your network is controlled, answered with a shrug. The service writer tablets that drop sync every time a tech walks past the alignment bay. The PCI questionnaire that sat on a desk for three weeks because nobody at the store knew which network the card terminals were actually on.
If any of that sounds familiar, we’ve worked through it before.
The Craftwork Group is a young entity. The people doing the work aren’t. Our team brings more than a hundred years of combined IT experience, doing this work since 1999, and automotive is one of the SMB verticals we work across.
Dealership IT is interconnection work. DMS, F&I, service management, inventory feeds, OEM portals, and payment systems were never designed to coexist cleanly, and most of them arrive with a vendor who wants more network access than they should have. The job is to build the foundation that holds those systems together, segment access so a vendor breach doesn’t become your breach, and document the environment so the next change isn’t a guess.
What working with us actually looks like. Helpdesk opens at 6:30 AM and runs until 5:00 PM, with on-call coverage after hours. Standard SLA is one-hour response; in practice, most calls get answered live as they come in. We treat phone calls as priority because if you’re calling, it’s urgent. The only thing that bumps a live call is a monitoring alert flagging a system down or under attack. We’re often the ones who tell you something broke before you noticed. Often we have it fixed before you’d have called.
A note on the rest of the field. We’ve spent the last few months calling MSPs posing as a buyer to see how the market actually operates. Over seventy-five percent never picked up the phone. None returned the sales inquiry. If you’ve shopped for IT support before, that probably tracks. We don’t work that way.
Most dealerships get IT from one of two places, and each misses something. Generic MSPs that treat the DMS as just-another-application and learn your vendor ecosystem on your time. Or the DMS vendor’s own services arm, which supports their platform and considers everything else your problem. We work the whole environment: the platforms, the network underneath them, and the boundaries between vendors. Built for stores that want one accountable party.
Network integration and segmentation for the systems your store runs on: DMS connectivity the vendor signs off on without owning your network, cloud F&I platforms with the bandwidth and failover to stay up on deal day, and OEM portal access that survives program-year credential changes. Vendor connections get isolated, documented, and reviewed, so a compromise on their side stays on their side.
Before any of the niche depth matters, the standard MSP work has to be solid. Workstation and server monitoring. Microsoft 365 management. Enterprise-grade firewalls, switching, and Wi-Fi sized for the showroom, the service bays, and the lot. Backup and disaster recovery with documented recovery drills, not the kind nobody runs until something breaks.
Payment systems isolated onto segmented networks with the access logging to show an assessor exactly what touches cardholder data and what can’t. We build the architecture, keep the documentation current, and sit with you through the questionnaire instead of leaving it on your desk. PCI scope that is small, mapped, and defensible beats PCI scope nobody can describe.
Wi-Fi engineered for the building you actually have: metal roofs, lifts, and a customer lounge full of phones. Service writer tablets and technician devices under mobile device management that doesn’t require a support call every shift change. Customer guest access fully separated from store operations, so hospitality never becomes exposure.
The honest wins in a dealership are administrative, not magical: document indexing across years of deal jackets and service records so retrieval stops being an archaeology project, credential and vendor-access tracking that doesn’t depend on a spreadsheet, and reconciliation between systems that don’t natively talk to each other. Real hours back, every week, without touching the sales process.
What we won’t do: promise AI will sell cars or write your service estimates. That’s not where the economics are honest yet. The right deployment eliminates hours of administrative reconciliation per week. The wrong one creates new work managing the AI.
Your model choice. Your API keys to OpenAI, Anthropic, or whoever you pick. Your data on infrastructure you own. We configure, deploy, and operate; you keep the keys and the option to take it all elsewhere.
No phone tree. No demo deck. A real conversation about what’s breaking in your store, what you’ve already tried, and whether there’s a path where we’d actually be useful. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere honest.
If we are a fit, the next step is an operations audit. A half-day on-site, a written assessment of what we’d do and what it would cost, no obligation past that point.
Book the 30-minute call →