By Danielle Longenecker, Product Marketing Manager
Whether your car dealership moves 10 vehicles a month through reconditioning or 30, each vehicle isn’t always treated equally. Your auto dealership may have a solid vehicle reconditioning process, but just one busy day in the service drive could delay turnaround times and cost your car dealership thousands of dollars. Are you aware of how often this is happening at your dealership? Or which step of the vehicle reconditioning process is causing issues?
Ideally, you’d want to see your vehicles front-line ready as quickly as possible without lowering the profit margin due to slow turnaround times. Some dealerships claim their process takes as little as four days, while others are seeing 12-15 days. The bottom line: faster turnaround means less money held up in inventory, yielding a higher ROI. Take our challenge below and see where your dealership is potentially losing in the recon race.
Calculate Your Dealership’s Reconditioning Time – Get the Worksheet
The Challenge
- Current Situation: Think about your dealership’s current vehicle reconditioning process. Using the worksheet from Part I, jot down what you believe is the number of days within each step of your process. Calculate each step and look at the overall timeframe you have estimated. Now keep this number in mind as you go through this 30-Day Challenge, and we’ll compare your outcome with your estimation at the end.
- Reconditioning Process: Select three vehicles that are ready to begin the vehicle reconditioning process (they don’t all have to start on the same day or week). Using the same worksheet as mentioned above, track how long the vehicle sits within each step of your reconditioning process. Don’t tell your teams you’re tracking their work; you want to have an accurate timeline of current processes in order identify true bottlenecks. Make notes on areas that are taking too long or could use a small improvement so you can reference them later.
- Analyzing Results: Look at the three vehicles you tracked through the reconditioning process and total up the number of hours/days it took for each vehicle. How do they compare with your initial estimated time frame from Step 1? Where are the areas of improvement? What changes are financially reasonable for your dealership?
Repeat this process quarterly to avoid relapsing into bad habits. This will be a lengthy process, but but will pay off in revenue and profit for your auto dealership. Too much work? Maybe you should think about implementing an easy-to-use software that can manage the whole process and drive results.
With Dominion Recon, we’ve seen the average days spent in reconditioning reduce from 16.7 days to 6.8 days. The Dominion Recon software provides instant alerts for each department as vehicles move through the process, mobile access for quick processing within each step, and detailed reporting to help identify bottlenecks and maintain an efficient reconditioning process on a daily basis.
Streamline your reconditioning process today! Call 877.421.1040 or click here to learn more about Dominion Recon.
