The UAE imported USD 20.6 billion of cars in 2024, making it the world’s thirteenth largest car importer, with China, the United States, and Japan supplying most of that volume (OEC, UN Comtrade data, 2024). Those vehicles arrive through a small number of importers and reach buyers through dealer networks that mostly run their own systems. The handover between the two is where the record breaks — and where a dealer management system either earns its cost or becomes an expensive second spreadsheet.
Where the importer’s record stops and the dealer’s begins
An importer’s system knows a vehicle well for the first months of its life. The unit is configured on the manufacturer’s site, imported into the system, reserved, shipped, checked at pre-delivery inspection, and sold on to a dealer — each step recorded against the same master record. The dealer’s system picks up the same car at reservation and follows it to the customer.
Across a dealer network, most of that handover runs on email and a shared spreadsheet.
The gap produces a specific set of failures rather than a general sense of friction. Two people give two answers to whether a VIN is available. Vehicle allocation gets decided against stock figures that were accurate yesterday morning. And when a dealer asks why a unit slipped three weeks, nobody can produce a single status history for it, because that history lives in two systems and a mailbox.
One vehicle record, two systems
OntargIT IDMS is built as two integrated halves. The CRM side runs on Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Field Service, covering the sales process, test drives, and after-sales contact. The ERP side runs on Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Human Resources, covering vehicle lifecycle, parts, service, logistics, and finance.
That split matches how importers work. A showroom salesperson and an import desk planner need different applications — they do not need different vehicle records.
Microsoft’s dual-write infrastructure keeps the two sides aligned. It provides near-real-time, bidirectional integration between finance and operations apps and Dataverse, so that a data change on either side writes to the other. Documented scenarios include an integrated customer master and a unified product mastering experience.
For a dealer management system, the practical result is that the reservation a dealer makes and the allocation the importer plans read from one record instead of two reconciled copies.
What the dealer sees when they open the portal
The IDMS dealer portal shows current stock, lets a dealer reserve a unit, raise a sales request, and exchange vehicles with another dealer in the network.
What sits underneath matters more than the screen. The Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management centrally tracks inventory status — on-hand, ordered, purchased, in-transit, returned, and quarantined — across data sources, warehouses, and locations, and its RESTful API returns on-hand records in near real time to external systems. A valid Supply Chain Management licence always includes it.
VIN as the unit of financial truth
IDMS uses the VIN or serial number as a financial dimension, allocating delivery, customs duty, risk, insurance, quality control, and overhead against the individual unit.
For an importer, that changes what margin means. Landed cost stops being an average spread across a shipment and becomes a number attached to the car standing in the compound. When a unit moves between dealers, its cost travels with it, so an inter-dealer transfer no longer quietly redistributes margin across the dealer network.
It also gives vehicle allocation a financial input rather than a purely logistical one. A planner can see which units carry the heaviest landed cost and place them where they will turn
About OntargIT’s automotive practice
OntargIT has delivered Dynamics 365 for automotive importers and their dealer networks, including Toyota Ukraine, which runs 35+ dealer centres, and Winner Imports, importer of Ford, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Porsche, and Bentley across 47 dealer centres. The same practice covers Toyota Motor Kazakhstan and MAN Truck & Bus, spanning CRM-led and full ERP deployments. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Business Applications since 2009, with 150+ projects delivered for 140+ clients in 24 countries and OntargIT builds IDMS on documented Microsoft platform capability rather than a proprietary stack.
Conclusion
The question is not which system produces better reports. It is which system owns the vehicle record between the moment a unit lands and the moment a dealer sells it. If that record currently lives in two databases and a mailbox, no dashboard will reconcile it. Map where your own record breaks today — the specific handoffs, the specific spreadsheets — before evaluating any platform. Book a free consultation with OntargIT to review that map against a Dynamics 365 architecture.
