With the advent of modern technology, there has been a serious improvement in terms of turnaround time across dealerships in general. Technology is used extensively these days to predict the inventory’s selling probability beyond a specific turn time, understand the necessity of discarding outdated inventory, and to ensure that fresh vehicles are always there in the inventory. Using technology dealers can Decrease Reconditioned Inventory Time to Market
In todays market where prices are high and inventory turns are slower, it is critical to get inventory through recon and on the front line as quickly as possible. This will not only reduce your holding costs, but also give your sales team more days to sell. Increasing the profitability of each sale.
Lets us discuss with the help of an example. Let us assume that your dealership has a target turnaround time of forty-five days. Out of this entire period, you spend seven days to get the vehicle fully reconditioned from the point of its acquisition. You may not be aware of the fact that by spending seven days in reconditioning, the sale probability of the vehicle is getting reduced by a significant 16 percent (7/45) before sending it to an auction or reducing its price drastically. It is a lost opportunity for you when a prospective buyer sees the vehicle at the end of the lot, but you are not in a position to let him/her take a closer look at it.
In many instances that the service department is not too worried about the vehicles from the sales department when they have enough service related vehicles. This is a common cause of friction between the service and sales departments. Therefore, it makes sense to find out whether the service department is paying adequate attention to quickly getting your vehicles front-line ready.
You may start by creating a standard operating procedure that should be followed by the sales department to communicate with the service department. Using this procedure, the sales team should let the service guys know about their expectations from the reconditioning process and how much time they can afford for the same. This organized approach to communication would certainly make a difference and create a win-win situation for all departments within the dealership.