An employee that has been doing the same task for years can confidently say they will do it at close to 100% efficiency. However, there are tasks that depend not only on the employee’s expertise, but also on other processes and activities that work concurrently. For instance, the best Parts Manager cannot guarantee a successful monthly purchase without knowing these concurrent activities, or by basing purchases on intuition.
Modern dealer management systems provide tools to make the right decisions with a higher success rate through:
- Accurate reports on the current status of each department.
- Key performance indicators created according to brand demands.
- Business Intelligence tools to detect trends and navigate large volumes of data.
Moreover, parts purchasing is a key process because:
- The success of each purchase depends on customer sales as well as parts requested by the Service Department.
- A poorly made purchase can increase immobilized inventory, and turn into an expense.
- Mistakes in parts purchasing can lead to an inventory that does not satisfy customer orders.
Reports That Provide an X-Ray of the Parts Department
Reports are photographs of each corner of the dealership that, if analyzed, provide different conclusions on the composition of the parts inventory, customers’ frequent purchases, parts with higher turnover, etc.
For example, a Parts Manager that uses Autologica DMS or a similar type of dealer management system can see information on:
Customers and parts
- The most purchased parts during a certain period of time.
- The reasons for all purchases that were not completed.
- The customers that make the most significant purchases.
Inventory
- The number of obsolete parts.
- Parts that should be transferred to another location so as to satisfy customer orders.
By adding this information to their expertise, Parts Managers can make more accurate decisions.
Dashboards to Analyze the Parts Department in Real Time
Control Panels based on business intelligence are a worldwide trend that has now arrived at automotive and equipment dealerships. The essence of these tools is that they take large data volumes generated daily and portray them in a friendly and useful way.
Continuing with the previous example, the Parts Manager can work on their daily tasks on one screen, while using another screen to see how key indicators, or KPIs, are performing.
For example, if the compliance rate (the customers’ orders satisfaction rate) has dropped, the Parts Manager can detect this situation and make decisions based on the cause, which could be:
- Only 6 items were offered because that was the quantity in the inventory. There was an inventory shortage.
- Only 6 items were offered, but the system showed 10 items in stock. There were organizational issues, or lack of parts traceability.
- The customer only wanted 6 items because the price was high.
The Parts Manager that uses these tools can make the right decisions based on trends detected at the dealership. However, even though these technologies “make data talk”, it is essential to know what to analyze and why, as there are multiple combinations of variables to analyze and information to cross-check.
Are you ready to hear the stories your dealership’s data has to tell?
