I have not heard of this tool. I have seen others with similar objectives, also most inventory management tools are attempting to bring this concept into their suite.
In 2007 we had been using an excel sheet to keep most of this information updated. I think many dealership employees are comfortable with excel and for some things it works well, however it is limited to one desktop. Sure you can map shared network drives, and try to not have access ownership issues but it is not sufficient.
We found the Desk Managers needed access to this information more often than anyone. The concept of how quickly can this vehicle be ready for the line is very important, and should be focused on. However we are all selling out of our inventory before it hits the line (in certain cases). Granted you must have the vehicle smogged and safetied prior to retail sales.
So to get the Desk Manager access to where and at what stage the inventoried item was currently in we moved the data from excel to our CRM tool. Seemed appropriate. Below is the screen shot.
Since then we have made sales we may not have otherwise as we are able to see if a unit is sell-able. Did the software lower our days in recon? It is hard to say that it did, but if we wanted to focus on seriously lowering our days in recon we would have reporting and analytics in place to do so.
