Originally published in the December 2022 edition of AutoSuccess
If you practice management-by-number in your stores and yet don’t know with 100 percent certainty what your reconditioning times, costs, and opportunities are, you’re not connecting to what you expect.
What we mean by connecting to what you expect is reconditioning driven by a time-to-line or T2L strategy that takes the uncertainty out of this vital business function.
You might have made it intact through the previous couple of years, but you’ll want the T2L crystal ball to bridge your business into 2023 and beyond.
T2L reconditioning is a predictable forecasting model that:
Organizes, structures, and streamlines how you move vehicles from acquisition to sale.
Equips everyone involved with your reconditioning game plan and notifies them of their role, so the right work at the proper times is done to meet your T2L goal.
Keeps used cars—from getting lost, languishing in processes, or being forgotten about at vendors and sublets.
Enables you to annotate and analyze recon costs per car, speed approvals, and share your recon investment with customers to build trust and value in your vehicles.
Ensures any vehicles having active safety recalls are flagged for attention, whether on transport, in recon, or on the lot.
Maximizes your first 30 for ideal sale speed and margin.
Despite intensive evangelism about modern reconditioning directed to auto retailers in recent years, a particular type of dealer remains skeptical of these claims. Some believe they retail too few used cars to benefit from a tool like T2. Others, dealers of substantial size, still use accountability methods not fit for the task.
I was pondering this situation when I concluded that what we often believe is a certainty is merely ingrained thinking toward something or someone, which becomes a truth for us.
That can make change difficult.
“We’ve always done it that way” is the hero of inaction—and the demise of competitiveness and profitability, especially for car dealers.
Until you track and monitor the flow of cars from acquisition to sale, you will not know how long that process takes your store. You may have close guesses but not verifiable clock times. This not knowing for sure is too costly for you to ignore. Deep diagnostic data helps you manage-out delays, bottlenecks, and waste so you can run your recon faster, more efficiently, and profitably.
Not only does running a recon department using reconditioning software create the data to manage and motivate by the numbers, but it also answers the why behind reconditioning performance. You can know what works and what doesn’t – and why – to improve recon efficiencies. And you can know what to expect.
About Rapid Recon
Reconditioning workflow automation from Rapid Reconis the industry standard in time-to-line inventory turn and speed-to-sale vehicle revenue enhancement for automotive retailers. Benchmarking data based on 13 million vehicles processed uniquely positions Rapid Recon to advise dealers on how to improve their store’s profitability. Used by more than 2,000 dealerships, Rapid Recon ensures the accountability of processes, property, and people. Hence, dealers know answers quickly, find assets anywhere, and sell vehicles promptly to grow dealership profitability. www.rapidrecon.com CALL US: +650-999-0497
