Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the intricacies of managing your dealership’s operational efficiency? In the fiercely competitive landscape of automotive dealerships, fixed operations stand as a battleground where success hinges on heightened visibility and rigorous training. Today’s sophisticated software presents a new opportunity for fixed ops management, offering a suite of features tailored to address key operational challenges and opportunities. From strategic pricing and compliance to operational excellence and service optimization, dealerships require these tools and support to thrive in today’s dynamic market.
Having worked in dealerships for over 22 years, I completely understand why fixed ops management professionals constantly feel as if they are under water. If you don’t have the information at your fingertips to guide you precisely to where your problems are, where do you start? Certainly not with the information provided by your DMS.
Today’s managers are facing a mountain of complexity in dealing with customers, manufacturers, service advisors, technicians, upper management and on and on. Access to key data is a start in helping them with problem identification, but then what? Most reporting in dealerships can give you the “what,” but what about the “who” and the “why”? The key to solving problems once an issue has been identified is to determine the “drivers.” What are drivers? Let’s look at it this way: what if your overall effective labor rate drops on a particular day? Where do you go to figure it out? Who caused the problem, what repair orders (ROs) did it happen on and which jobs on those ROs drove the issue? If you don’t have an efficient way to get those answers, most likely it simply goes by the wayside while you deal with the plethora of other urgent issues in any number of areas.
Now, what if you were able to start each day with issues presented to you that occurred the day before with all the aforementioned elements served up to you in a digestible format? You would understand things like deviations from parts and labor pricing policies, one-line ROs with missed opportunities, discounting authorized and unauthorized, critical multi-point inspection and menu penetration metrics and a host of other mission-critical items.
These tools are not intended to bludgeon your employees, but rather they present a coaching opportunity. When we show our advisors and technicians where they are missing the mark, we are truly presenting an avenue for them to improve their performance. Add what-if capabilities to the visibility to show them the impact of minor changes to their numbers and ultimately their paycheck, and you’re now sitting on a powerful system of continuous performance improvement. From a macro perspective, if you can look at vast amounts of data and see it trended and dissected, you have put your capabilities as a manager on steroids.
Of course, as we all know from our retail experience that you might be saying to yourself, “How in the world can I do even one more thing in my busy day?” That’s where transformative performance coaching comes in. Imagine having seasoned fixed operations experts supporting you with the stated purpose of unlocking the full potential of service departments, providing personalized strategies and innovative solutions focused on efficiency, employee performance and bottom-line results.
Although not pervasive, this software/coach service is available today. You don’t need to be wowed by the hard-to-grasp AI future that is supposedly on the horizon or being marketed by some as being integral to their offerings today. The basics have not changed in fixed ops, only our ability to access data in a meaningful and efficient way that simply wasn’t possible before.
