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Tracking the Used Car Reconditioning Process

BZ,
Does your store use any manual milestones and phases such as service and detail recon? If you do, who enters those dates into the life cycle?? We are kicking around starting to use this to help measure turnaround time.

It would be really awesome if it could sync with your DMS and pull the Repair Order date into those milestones instead of having to manually enter it. Maybe identify it through op codes??
 
If you want it online with photos in 72 hours why send it to the shop first? Why not send it to clean up, then photos, then shop? Worse case it ends up being a wholesale car and you are sending a clean car to the sale.

I like this process a lot, unfortunately we don't take our pictures, we have a 3rd party and most smaller dealer do, so your waiting on them to get your pictures done. But this is something I am going to look into. Only issue is you need quality control to inspect the vehicle coming out of the shop, making sure now grease foot prints, finger prints, etc.
 
We've been using vAuto's Lifecycle tool, and it's been working great, giving us some great insight into how it affects both our fixed and variable ops... If you use vAuto and have no other recon process tracking tools, I'd highly recommend using it. Feel free to send me a message if you want to see how we're using or have questions about setting it up! Or you could talk to your performance manager.

It's pretty easy to use and set up. First, you establish milestone dates such as Inventory Date, Service Recon Completed Date, Body Work Completed Dated, Vehicle Detail Completed, Date Price Added, Photos Added, Description Added, Window Sticker Created, First Seen on Website, First Seen on AutoTrader, Vehicle Sold, etc.

Then you can create phases using those milestones --- such as Time from Inventory to Service Recon, Time from Inventory to Clean Up, Time to Adding Photos, etc. Within that you can set goals for each phase, drill down to which vehicles are still in each phase or past the goal, etc. It even gives you a breakdown of averages for each phase for your current inventory and even your historical trends.
 
This is just me thinking out loud, what if a your CRM system could create task based off a deal having a trade in? It could auto create a task for the used car manager to inspect the unit to determine if retail/wholesale, create a task for who ever handles recon in service to be expecting or looking for stock#XXXX since it was traded for, create a task for who ever takes photos, etc. Do you see where I am going with this? Maybe this is what the VAuto system does I have not used it, but you would think someone could do it.