VIRTUAL NEW ORLEANS, January 28, 2021 – The Next Rapid Recon at NADA ’21 will deliver simplified online mobile and desktop access to the latest products, features, and best practices in new and used vehicle reconditioning and speed to sale solutions for dealers attending this uniquely different National Automobile Dealers Association convention.

At all-virtual NADA ’21, February 9 to 11, NADA-registered attendees can access Rapid Recon’s 360-degree virtual 3D annex exhibit during show hours, after hours and beyond, through rapidrecon.com.

This advanced experience offers auto dealers and their management teams nearly unlimited access to rich, interactive content to showcase the industry’s No. 1 reconditioning workflow software and performance management services. Dealers using Rapid Recon workflow software to bring transparency, accountability, and more control to reconditioning get cars sale-ready faster to compete more successfully in today’s new and used car marketplace.

To make dealers’ time at Virtual NADA ’21 even richer, Rapid Recon offers two easy-to-access virtual experiences:

• A premier 3D exhibit accessible through the NADA ’21 virtual experience, plus,
• A seamlessly integrated yet distinctly different interactive and exclusively 3D Rapid Recon annex exhibit (portal not active until February 9) open before and after regular NADA show hours and beyond.

The Rapid Recon 3D virtual experience offers visitors a wide range of interactions. These include a robust Learning Center, “live” consultations with Rapid Recon fine-tune performance teams, a What’s New center, and real-time and schedule-later product demos to explain critical reconditioning performance indicators such as time to line and speed to sale. Live Chat stations posted throughout and a Social Lounge for messaging Rapid Recon founder and CEO Dennis McGinn enhance engagement.

Dealership general managers and their fixed and variable operation managers all benefit when Rapid Recon is used to drive inventory turn, increase labor hours and parts revenue. Only Rapid Recon equips the sales team with in-their-hand, on-the-go mobile inventory intelligence to help them build value in the deal from their first contact with the prospect. Over 20,000 monthly users across over 2,400 auto dealerships use Rapid Recon workflow software to be more efficient, responsive and competitive.

Dealers themselves have always been ahead of us in their desire for more seamless and coordinated vendor relations. When we asked more questions, their answers led to creating new tools for helping fill this workflow coordination gap. 

More About Improving Recon Vendor Coordination

Some dealers remain unsure about the value of this product to their used car profitability. This quick read addresses those questions.

Congratulations! You’ve decided to advance your used car business by improving its reconditioning efficiencies through automation.

Now what? 

Few people like change, and a shift in daily habits the least, so include your team in your planning:

• Staff will appreciate how their engagement with this software will make their work more predictable and profitable for themselves and their dealership.

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• Managers will manage their people, processes, and outcomes using precise, real-time communications and performance tracking and accountability features.

As a dealership software system, reconditioning workflow makes conditioning used cars for resale more streamlined, orderly, measurable, and precisely more profitable.

By working together to build advanced reconditioning, your team will increase inventory turn, reduce costs, and get cars ready to sell faster so you can extend a better buying experience to your customers.

Build Your Team

Dedicated recon teams always win the reconditioning production and performance race. And centralized recon centers almost consistently outperform recon operations having to operate out of the service department.

A dedicated recon staff entails technicians, detailers, an advisor, one or more porter, and a reconditioning manager, all who are focused on this task. A process-oriented advisor will work better in this environment than a customer-focused advisor taken from the service lane.

If creating a dedicated team and location is out of the question, then at a minimum, assign within the main service shop one or more service bays and internal technicians for recon mechanical inspection and repair.

The critical takeaway is you want recon to create its processes specifically to what recon does, instead of adapting the service lane process for internal work.

Related: How to boost your automotive recon process and capitalize on used-car popularity

Furthermore:

1. * Give recon autonomy – reporting to fixed ops, but a distinct operating unit not answering to service, the body shop, or the used car manager.

1. * Appoint one individual to be accountable for recon operations, someone who will make the decisions, interprets the data, and sinks or swims by recon performance metrics.

1. * Hire ASE-certified internal techs able to inspect and diagnose vehicle issues. New-car certifications are not necessary. Set up your own parts department sourced by a local supplier and hire porters, so you’re not asking sales to run cars around; they lose selling time doing so.

Earn the Team’s Buy-In

As with any software you use, before you use it, you’ll investigate its value to your business, and you’ll involve input from managers and future users in your exploratory meetings. 

Advancing a recon operation from a paper- or spreadsheet-based management style to reconditioning software will present its fleeting trials. Managers will expect quick results, and system users may be slow to catch – or they might adapt seemingly overnight — depending on their comfort and experience using computer systems. 

Include here the GM and managers of your service, used car, and recon departments. You will also want to include your internal technicians, detailers, vehicle photographers, and parts personnel.  An increasing number of dealerships are also involving their sales teams and BDC.

Benchmark Your Performance

With data compiled from more than 13 million cars having been processed through dealership recon workflow software, our data tells us some interesting information:

1. Most dealerships using recon automation for the first time discover their recon cycle time is 10 to 21 or more days – whereas management’s “gut” feel has been telling them their recon cycle is “about three days.” 

1. Your current actual recon cycle rate in days will become apparent after one month’s operation on recon software. It will decrease after that, reducing your time to line (T2L) to a best-practices benchmark of three to five days.

1. Automated workflow tracking will pinpoint bottlenecks, individuals who may need additional training or reassignment, and challenges with vendors, parts suppliers, and repair approvals that may be delaying your T2L.

By using the performance reports reconditioning automation software makes accessible by mobile or desktop, managers can home in on the people, processes, and performance challenges that may be costing your dealership turn rate, retail margin, and lost opportunities. 

Leverage the Advantage

With reconditioning automation in place, you will:

• Stimulate productivity and job satisfaction

• Understand the math behind faster time to line

• Build a rapid recon culture

• Dedicate a recon team
• Manage the critical metrics - T2L, ADR, Speed-to-Sale and Keys-to-Keys - to increased dealership performance

If you’re considering reconditioning automation, here are five best practices to understand:

1. How to create trackability
2. How to set up and manage accountability throughout your recon operation
3. How to continually reduce your time to line
4. How to leverage best practices to increase inventory turn
5. How to set up your systems to know where all your cars are all the time

As you explore this automated solution to personnel communications and accountability, vehicle and key tracking, and performance, visit us for more helpful articles and whitepaper downloads. 

PALO ALTO, CA, November 12, 2020 — At next week’s series of virtual on-demand workshops at Used Car Week’s Pre-Owned Con, Curtis Sampson, New Business Manager for Rapid Recon, will show dealers how to apply sports "Game Film" analysis techniques to used car reconditioning.

His on-demand workshop, Film Time: the Best ROI You Can Make, will explore how to use game film concepts for improving used car reconditioning’s crucial success metrics -- time to line, average days in recon, and speed to sale so dealers can sell more cars faster.

Sampson’s workshop is available as early as Monday, November 16, for registered event attendees.

This workshop helps improve reconditioning efficiencies for any reconditioning operation, regardless of dealership size, brand or used car volume. Independent used car operators will also find this workshop profitable.

Sampson has been a dealer principal, general manager, general sales manager, finance manager, and used vehicle director. He joined Rapid Recon in 2019.

To review this pre-owned workshop’s learning objectives, visit Used Car Week Pre-Owned Con.

The Next Rapid Recon serves over 20,000 monthly users across more than 2,000 dealerships. Rapid Recon experts such as Sampson shared essential performance metrics and best practices with dealers to help them achieve continuous reconditioning time to line and speed to sale improvement.

Contact

Jim Leman

847-840-0784

jim@rapidrecon.com

Long after social distancing and the wearing of personal protection equipment becomes a memory (soon, we pray), consumer alertness to microbial dangers will remain active, redefining how auto retailers and their customers view and interact with inventory.

It’s one thing to disinfect horizontal surfaces, another to clean vehicles every time one returns from a test drive or a porter moves one off a transport. A dealer’s inventory now becomes a moveable risk.

It’s a safe bet no auto dealer ever thought he or she would also be in the vehicle disinfection and personal safety business, as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced upon the industry.  But most companies are now – and especially for car dealers, in it for the long haul.

Ensuring customers that the vehicles they sit in, test- drive and take delivery of aren’t COVID-19 carriers – or potential sources of other viruses and dangerous bacteria – isn’t as simple as stocking up on Lysol.

Instead, big-league solutions are necessary for protecting team members and customers from COVID-level risks. Front-and-center of any disinfectant product evaluation is the product must meet the EPA’s criteria for use against SARS-CoV-2.

The EPA provides a list of COVID-19 disinfectants, but notice that these products “are for use on surfaces, not humans.”

Industry organizations have responded to pandemic risks to dealers. Two such providers are The NADA Coronavirus Hub, and Motor Magazine’s COVID-19 Outbreak and Automotive Response.

Moving Targets

Not so easily sanitized and made safe for consumers is inventory. That task wouldn’t be such a problem if the vehicles on your lot weren’t moving, which will be increasingly so as state-by-state lockdown rules are lifted.

“That’s a great question, and one that concerns me as a dealer,” said John Napoleon, dealer principal for Carson City Hyundai in Carson City, NV. “I’m not so naive as to believe we’re going to be able to clean every vehicle every time someone touches it.”

Carson City Hyundai sells 30 new and 50 used cars a month.

“We’re training staff on this topic,” said Lou Bregou, director of Operations for the 18-store group Driver’s Village, near Syracuse, NY.

Both dealers have implemented different solutions to this challenge.

“Dealerships using sanitizing wipes, plastic steering wheel, and door-handle covers and similar entry-level solutions to protect staff and customers are not doing enough,” said Joe Colucci, with PermaSafe Protective Coatings, LLC, a manufacturer of vehicle disinfection and long-term antimicrobial protection products.

“I wrote a LinkedIn post on the efficacy of various antimicrobials just before NADA this year and received 1,500 views. Within a few weeks of the convention, my views jumped to 400,000,” he said, noting soaring interest in reducing COVID-19 risks to their employers and customers.

Definitions Help

Colucci explained that the term “antimicrobial” could be confusing, as it’s “an overly-broad category that includes everything from the most sophisticated sterilizing agents used in organ transplant surgery, to mold and mildew treatments for swimming pools. And that’s where the confusion stems from.”

Unlike sanitizer and disinfectant, the term antimicrobial does not represent a level of efficacy. Instead, it’s weakly defined as any product marketed with any claim related to killing or inhibiting the growth of any microorganism.

Antimicrobial products must be approved for registration with the EPA. The exceptions are those capable of achieving the efficacy standards of a sanitizer (must kill 99.9% of bacteria) or a disinfectant (must kill 99.9% of bacteria and viruses), or even a hospital-grade disinfectant (99.999% of bacteria and viruses), they’re not viable options in today’s new microbe-conscious world, he said.

With the liability potential, dealers should consider bypassing the use of sanitizers for disinfectants containing antimicrobials, Colucci said.

He advised dealers evaluating disinfectant products to insist on seeing and reading the products’ EPA Master Label. It defines what the product does, its safety profile, correct use and the marketing claims you can make about its use in your store," he said.

The EPA has yet to register any disinfectant product as capable of killing COVID-19. Some disinfectants, such as PermaSafe CLEAN, have been approved by the EPA for use against SARS-CoV-2. This virus is the novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.

“COVID created unique new challenges for dealers, but as the industry has always done in a crisis, it knuckled down to meet it. Consumer awareness and vehicle disinfectant protection programs help dealers fulfill their commitments to customer safety,” said Jim Maxim, DealerMax chief executive officer.

 DealerMax offers free training and tools, including a customizable dealer-branded COVID-19 “Protection Promise” program, which includes a safety checklist of disinfecting steps and processes for all operations of the dealership, including vehicles on the lot and in service.

"Equally as important as using the right products is articulating to customers how you’ve created a safe environment for them - or they likely won’t buy from you. We are selling safety and have to be doing what we say consistently, with accountability. Our program helps dealers promote this concern and protection to their customers," Maxim said.

Dealers Speak

“Our process for all vehicle cleaning is the same – we have homemade 8” by 11” heavy stock COVID Dirty and COVID Clean signs for vehicles, which we place on the driver-side dash, to identify their sanitation status,” said Bregou. “We use 98% alcohol in spray bottles and disposable paper towels to sanitize vehicle interiors. We clean a car in about five minutes, though trade-ins, which we sanitize before we move those cars into recon, take longer.”

Rubbing alcohol solutions having at least 70% alcohol is effective against coronavirus. WebMD reports that this treatment should be left on surfaces for 30 seconds to ensure they will kill viruses. Pure or 100% alcohol, the site noted, evaporates too quickly.

Bregou said his disinfectant process follows NADA guidelines for disinfecting automobile interior “hot spots.”

Napoleon’s approach to inventory sanitation is similar: treat vehicle interiors with a long-acting antimicrobial spray-on product and then use placards that state which vehicles have been treated.

“I visited PermaSafe at NADA and purchased their system just days before COVID hit the U.S. hard,” Napoleon said. “I had no idea then how fortuitous the decision to visit their booth would be for us.”

Jim Leman has been writing about automotive retail variable and fix operations since 1992.

jimleman@gmail.com

One of the best practices for improving reconditioning results is to improve the flow of clear-title status communications between the finance and reconditioning departments.

This small improvement can help finance play an even more timely role in a dealership’s ability to improve inventory turn rate.

In a modern time-to-line and speed-to-sale reconditioning environment, even the sales and finance departments have a hand in getting cars frontline ready faster.

The best practice here is to have a Clear Finance alert between the finance and reconditioning departments. Clear Finance means the dealership now owns the title to the trade-in vehicle waiting for reconditioning.

Reconditioning started on a vehicle lacking title clearance can create problems for the reconditioning and the finance departments. Delays in bank loan approvals for the new car that generated the trade-in and lagging contracts in transit can mean cars processing through recon the dealership doesn’t own.

When that happens, and the unresolved clear-title status of that vehicle comes to light, management may choose to:

Pull that vehicle out of reconditioning to wait for the Finance Clear signal. Pulling a car out of the reconditioning workflow can slow down the delivery of sale-ready vehicles to the sales lot.

• Continue reconditioning, absorbing any repair investments in that vehicle should that transaction need to be unwound due to the lender’s loan decline or another issue.

Either situation creates unproductive dead time in the dealership’s reconditioning workflow. Modern reconditioning is a race to get used cars that a dealer buys at auctions or as trade-ins mechanically and cosmetically inspected, repaired, and ready for sale. Any delay in this process slows this momentum, and as a result, the inventory turn rate.

Slowed recon may not seem tremendously significant, but Nicole Renninger, a former dealership F&I director who now provides dealership support for reconditioning software company Rapid Recon, says recon speed matters a great deal.

“How fast a dealer can recondition a car and get it ready to sell influences the profitability of a vehicle when sold. Delays in communicating clear title status to the recon department slow this process, which becomes a drag on inventory turn,” Renninger said. “And finance has more influence on recon speed than many dealers and managers consider.”

For dealerships where contracts in transit or deal unwinds are prevalent, adding a step to their reconditioning processes called Clear Finance may be necessary, she said.

Renninger noted these considerations:

• State laws pertaining to title handling
• Percentage of unwound deals
• Percentage of deals with trade-ins
• Finance department efficiency
• The average dollar investment for trade-in reconditioning

“I have worked for KIA and GMC stores where this was a challenge, and for Cadillac stores where it is not,” Renninger said.

“The risk increases when vehicles are spot delivered and then finance is slow in submitting loan paperwork, or there’s trouble getting an ex-spouse’s signature on a trade-in title, all the while the consumer drives around in a vehicle they think they own. Whether dealers need a Clear Finance notification for recon depends on how much risk dealers want to take.”

Jim Leman has been writing about automotive retail variable and fixed operations since 1992.

By Imran Mussani, Vice President, Operations, for MaximTrak Division of RouteOne

As appearing in the March edition of F&I and Showroom magazine

You’re probably seeing Gen Z buyers now connecting with you, typically first by digital and then by phone or in-person, as the generation has become of vehicle-buying age.

Sixty-three percent of this group, men and women born since 1996, will buy a used car rather than new model.[1] This may be one reason that Lending Tree reports Gen Z has the least and the lowest auto debt, with the median loan balance $13,666[2].

Gen Z is a considerable population -- about 90.55 million, noted statistics company Statista[3].  One-third of the generation was of car-buying age as of last summer, a Ford Motor Company blog reports.[4]

Pew Research called these consumers the “always-on” generation. “By the time they were in their teens…they connected with the web through mobile devices, WiFi and high-bandwidth cellular,” Pew noted in early 2019.[5] 

The Marchex Institute, a mobile advertising analytics company, said its research revealed that Gen Z shoppers “do not prefer digital-only interactions.” Instead, they’re a “click-to-call” shopper after first completing their online research. Thus, these consumers are inclined to interact with you across multiple platforms, from digital retail, mobile, and in-person.

Two actions should be considered based on these data points:

One, how are you addressing your store’s digital footprint to enable Gen Z convenient access to your F&I product offerings, using the connection and communications platforms they prefer?

Two, what modifications to your in-store customer engagement practices should be adjusted or reinvented to put Gen Z at ease, in control, and well-attended to when they visit the showroom?

Online magazine Retail TouchPoints, citing data from the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with the National Retail Federation, provides insight into these buyers’ engagement  expectations:

• 66% shop brick and mortar
• 75% use mobile to shop
• 48% use mobile apps to shop
• 49% said “ability to find what I want quickly” is important
• 36% want speedy shopping

For F&I, these buyer preferences suggest:

• No more digital retail excuses: Migrate variable and fixed operations to digital. Though end-to-end digital retail is the industry’s goal, remember these consumers still ask to engage with businesses in person. Make F&I product information, menus, and purchase options accessible online and on mobile to aide their research, comparison, push to their social network to get their communities’ endorsement.

• Educate and differentiate online: Push your product presentation online. Provide valuable product and product value insight using PDF documents, infographics, explainer videos and chat services to engage Gen Z where they shop. Engage them in interactive lifestyle and risk surveys to help more confidently match products to needs. Push these digital merchandising tools to them as you gather contact information.
• Be where they look: Reach this “always on” buyer across multiple channels, using AI, chatbots or virtual assistants on your website, social media, car-listing sites and elsewhere Gen Z researches inventory and dealerships to keep the conversation moving forward.
• Put them in control: Enable web and mobile-enabled product menus Gen Z can consider on their time, at their pace, “playing” with options that interest them. Restaurants are having upsell success doing so for their business. “If a common addition to a cheeseburger is bacon, a kiosk can offer messaging that gives customers the chance to add bacon to their burger for an upcharge,” said the blog, “How Do Self Service Kiosks Impact Sales?” at TouchSuite.com, a point-of-sale technologies provider.[6]
• Be transparent: This means full disclosure, complete explanation of any documents or paperwork you ask them to sign, and consistent messaging and pricing – from online messaging to the prices they’re quoted by the F&I office.
• Improve phone skills: the Marchex study reported that Gen Z consumers are 60% more likely to hang up the phone if not answered within 45 seconds – and are 30% more likely to curse if they feel their needs are not being met.
• Reinvent your meet-and-greet: Assume these consumers have done their homework and made their decisions – but be open to suggesting options. Teach and show them, but answer them quickly, sharing accurate and reliable content. Put on a service-first attitude. Gen Z’s visit stores because they value high touch as an important complement to the high-tech, they use first to connect.
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• Dealers today have a choice of F&I technologies to engage, satisfy and sell to Gen Z buyers. Use yours to educate this audience to help them understand what your products do and how they will benefit by their purchase – and do this online across multiple communications channels.

When you use digital, interactive and transparent devices to engage Gen Z’s hands and minds in the product evaluation and decision process, they will feel in control, a high need for the Gen Z car buyer.  Provide consumers with an individualized product match to their risk and lifestyle characteristics and product penetration and PVR will increase.

Imran Mussani is Vice President, Operations, for MaximTrak Division of RouteOne.

PHILADELPHIA, PA – DealerMax announced today the downloadable availability of its latest dealership performance directive, Dealership 2020 Guide: Re-engineering Automotive Retail, discussing six essential online sales processes the new online sales retail environment requires.

“The world has changed overnight, and although many dealerships are now closed for onsite sales, many are looking for ways to optimize their remote retail strategies to reach customers online, sell over the phone, and reconfigure their low-tech operations to adapt,” said Jim Maxim, Jr., chief executive officer for the dealership support company.

The DealerMax team of digital retail experts wrote the guide to give dealers an important sense of control and focus as the industry recognizes the urgency to move sales online where consumers increasingly feel more comfortable, safe, and empowered to shop and buy cars. They will prefer dealership’s offering processes that enable them single-source contact, especially in-store, to add layers of safety and comfort.

“In other words, there is a new roadmap to the sale. Meaning, selling cars remotely, and this guide helps dealers to better grasp several of the concrete steps they’re likely to find necessary on their path to successful online, remote car sales,” Maxim said.

To help dealers learn more immediately, DealerMax has developed a series of weekly webinars. Enriched content for each process change module are also being developed.  

Maxim pioneered digital F&I in 2003 as chief executive officer for MaximTrak, which he sold to RouteOne in 2016, so he thoroughly understands the necessity of bringing different sets of customer engagement processes with technology to robust end-to-end online car sales.

“This change can be a hard choice for dealers who, before COVID, were convinced people still wanted to come in, look around, and touch a car, even if they didn’t buy,” Maxim said. 

To best equip dealers to make these process changes, In addition, an immediately available download version, the DealerMax Dealership 2020 Guide: Re-engineering Automotive Retail (click to download) guide discusses:

• How should you retool your people and reconfigure your customer experience?
   
• What are the techniques, technologies, training needed for commerce during a crisis?
   
• What are the critical decisions to make to business processes and sales workflow to transact? 
   
• How will your processes change as you limit your face-to-face time with your customers?
   
• How can you position your dealership to not only survive the moment but to become more influential in a post-pandemic world?

 Click here to download Dealership 2020 Guide: Re-engineering Automotive Retail.

Media Contact:

Steve Forde

215-833-9988

sforde@dealermax.com

PALO ALTO, CA – March 16, 2020 – Rapid Recon, the nation’s most extensive vehicle reconditioning technology company, announced today the temporary suspension of onsite training and the expansion of its online training program. Both decisions help address health concerns for dealership customer personnel and Rapid Recon employees, due to COVID-19 pandemic travel concerns.

To maintain the highest levels of customer performance and support, Rapid Recon expanded its team of process performance management experts by 50%.

“The safety and well-being of our customers’ personnel and of the Rapid Recon team is our top priority, as it has always been,” said Dennis McGinn, Rapid Recon chief executive officer. “We will continue to monitor the circumstances surrounding the coronavirus, and we will be taking necessary precautions to ensure our continued service and support to the automotive industry.”

In addition to the increase in the Rapid Recon online support team, the company also retained the services of several companies specializing in video online training to assist in this expansion.

Over the past 10 years, Rapid Recon has developed a comprehensive online training protocol, which more than 2,000 dealers nationwide and in three countries.

February was a record-breaking sales month for the company, with more than 70 new dealer partners joining Rapid Recon to improve their inventory turn, per-vehicle revenue, and unique sales advantages. At NADA, the company announced two new products, Vendor Advantage and Live Locate, and added six new teammates to meet market demands for its leading vehicle reconditioning software solution.

For more information about Rapid Recon, visit www.rapidrecon.com.

By Dennis McGinn, Founder, CEO Rapid Recon

In 2019, at least two new companies have stepped into the vehicle reconditioning arena to transition dealers out of their old manual and costly ways of processing used cars.

The objective behind automated recon workflow software is to improve time to line (T2L) and thus drive turn performance, cost savings and better sale margins.

New market entrants endorse the value T2L software brings to the used car department. Dealers, fleets, rental companies and remarketers all benefit by jumping on the T2L bandwagon.

What’s to Lose?

Nothing is lost by improving how fast cars get reconditioned --- ability to process cars more quickly from acquisition to the front line is vital to any dealer selling used cars! Recon driven by T2L continuous process improvement is critical if you want to “amp up” speed to sale.

This core idea is that by removing waste, costs and delay from reconditioning — primarily in the recon-repair approval process — dealers will get cars ready for sale in three to five days, far surpassing the average dealership’s T2L of 10 to 21 days!

From the financial side, T2L and speed to sale are the GM’s most productive profit-making tools.  GMs who are focused on these making these metrics happen in their store get cars get from acquisition to the sale line in hours, not days so that they can be sold, and that revenue used to pay overhead and commissions and buy more cars.

When cars languish on their way to sale-ready, nothing good happens.

Unsold cars mean floorplan interest continues to accumulate. Holding cost depreciation — each car’s share of general overhead — continues to pile up at the rate of $35 to $85 per day, depending on the brand, and as they age, their value approaches zero.

Much to Gain

The automation and art of rapid reconditioning has come a long way since the first T2L recon workflow software hit the market in 2010. A few dealers gave the software a try, chatted it up at 20 Groups, and the demand took off.

Yet there is more to creating and managing a faster recon shop than getting cars through those processes faster. Dealers tell us their T2L, driven by a unified speed to sale culture among fixed ops, recon and the used car department, motivates efficiency up and down the line, because steps, processes and people are driven by accountability to meet specific time-centric performance goals.  

With the right recon automation in place, a manager building high-performance teams is better equipped to bring everyone involved in recon into tighter agreement of what needs to be done, by whom, and when. The right events, the right vehicles, the right next steps are communicated clearly –and annotated so incidents of “I forgot,” or “It’s not my responsibility,” and “I thought I’d done that” no longer drive others crazy or cause undue speed delays or drive up holding costs during the actual reconditioning steps.

The use of the right recon software starts recon performance improvement - and gives teams the tools to nurture a culture of improved communications, cooperation and multi-department focus.

Dealers, pay attention to the new entrants into the recon automation marketplace – their presence is a sure sign they smell opportunity and so they should; too many of you continue to plug away at your used car department without recognizing the need for speed to sale to increase turn and sales margin.

The entire industry is better off when unnecessary costs and delays are removed from recon time to line.

If you doubt, we’d be happy to put into your hands the T2L bible, Recon T2L, the Starting Line for Reversing Margin Compression, which discusses precise guideline for how to drive more revenue from your used car operation.

Just recently, a Honda dealership principal called Keith Brice, our Virginia-based performance manager, to inform him he’d read the book and was requesting six more copies for his management team. For more substantial groups, we’ve shipped boxes of the book to their managers at the request of their senior-level executives because they understand the implications of running an efficient recon department(s) that gets cars sale-ready in three to five days to:

Increase inventory turn – one turn for every 2.5 days faster recon

• Get cars sale-ready having nearly 86% of their prime retail days remaining, not 52% when routine recon typically consumes 10 days of a car’s primary retail window.

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• Deliver a ROI – a payback – of $50 for every $1 spent for the recon automation

It’s tempting to assign competition to the category of flattery. Perhaps…but instead, let’s use a more accurate description of other companies’ rush to imitate success, provided by Gospel musician Cheryl James. She once said, “The best form of flattery is to be admired, respected and imitated.”

We’re all three now.

Dennis McGinn is founder and chief executive officers for Rapid Recon, the standard in automated recon workflow software. www.rapidrecon.com