Reconditioning workflow evangelists such as Dennis McGinn, founder, and CEO of Rapid Recon, says GMs who create a Time-to-Market workflow culture among recon, service and used cars can help dealers: 

• Drive down recon costs – up to a quarter-million-dollars or more a year
• Get vehicles frontline ready in four to five days – not 10 to 12!
• Increase inventory turns 2.5 times for every five days shaved in recon 

“The message from this year’s NADA was ‘be prepared.’ Dealers recognize that leaner times ahead will require other parts of their business to pick up any slack. Recon is an ideal hidden treasury,” McGinn said. “Getting a dealership to this level of recon efficiency and profitability is a GM-level responsibility.” 

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“If the general manager isn’t involved in one of the highest profiting departments in the store, you might have the wrong GM,” Tom Dunn, General Manager for the Fred Martin Superstore, Barberton, Ohio, told me. 

“If you don’t care about improving reconditioning, why should your staff?” says Edward Hyde, dealer principal of the Legacy Auto Network, London, Kentucky. 

Dealers who successfully establish this culture start by replacing outdated and largely ineffective reconditioning tracking methods such as whiteboards, spreadsheets and sticky notes with automation. They assign a management-level champion to manage its daily oversight, and they use their reconditioning software to structure work and then monitor and control its outcome to specific time deadlines.

Consider these points:

• Vehicle tracking via spreadsheet or whiteboard, while an improvement over sticky notes, is neither transportable nor shareable. In my experience, use of these tracking tools falls into disuse after a brief and energetic start.
• Misplaced vehicles can be taken out of the process temporarily while they await parts or repair authorization. The busy-ness of the day means these units are too easily forgotten about – or take time to locate again when ready to reenter the process.
• Misplaced communication between recon and the used-car manager slows repair approvals, causing delays that mount up and erode gross margin.
• Many compensation plans are based on time, not units of production

Each of these inefficient processes cost money – in time, labor and days in recon. 

The recon process should flow from point A to B in linear fashion. If that looks like an assembly line, it is. Your recon processes may not include each of the steps that this illustration shows, but running recon like a factory focuses on maximizing output and reducing cost.

More details here.