By Colin McElhatton
Ask anyone who has worked in retail automotive about missing keys and vehicles. Losing track of valuable assets plagues every department at every dealership they’ve worked for.
However, when you can know in real time where assets are:
- Service departments bill more hours
- Vehicles get through reconditioning faster
- Vehicle selection is sped up and
- The customer experience is improved.
The challenge is how mobile these assets are — vehicles, employees and vendors move from place to place. To lose, misplace or simply not know where an asset is when needed wastes time, productivity, and sales and service opportunities.
Keeping track of your high-value, moving assets can be tedious, haphazard — and high risk to your efficiency and competitiveness. It need not be that way. Many dealers simplify the task when starting digital location service technologies to handle the job precisely and effortlessly, so valuable time isn’t spent tracking cars, people or vendors.
For example, Sunset Imports needed a solution for tracking vehicles and keys for their sales inventory. After realizing how much time they were wasting trying to locate a car or keys (or often both), they added tracking for their service and reconditioning departments. By automating asset tracking, they save an hour in the sales process and 1.5 hours per technician per day in billable hours service hours.
They report their weekly return on investment is more than $10,000 from service department savings alone since using the Mobile Dealer Data Locate device.
Rapid Recon Certified Partner Mobile Dealer Data (MDD) is an industry-first, real-time location service designed to solve this core problem for auto dealers. Every department benefits from knowing exactly where all vehicles and keys are located.
Wireless technologies have improved, and their prices have come down. It’s time to eliminate the age-old issue of where the keys and the car are. Learn more at www.mdd.io or call 844-292-7110.
Colin McElhatton is the founder and owner of Mobile Dealer Data, a Certified Rapid Recon business partner. https://www.mdd.io/
