With each year, more and more dealerships are adapting to the latest and greatest technology. They’re doing this to increase their inventory turn times, but to also anticipate the likelihood of selling outside of those time spans. There are many things to consider as a used car dealership, but one thing for sure is that each day a vehicle is being reconditioned, you’re losing money.

So, let’s approach time to market with an example. Let’s say your turn time is 50 days, but it takes you a total of nine days to recondition the vehicle from auction to the lot. With that turn time alone, you’re already reducing the vehicle’s chance of getting sold by 18 percent. Beyond that, if you wait too long, you may have to send it back into auction or reduce the price significantly to make any profit from it. The longer you have a vehicle in inventory that isn’t driveable by a potential customer, the less likely it’ll get sold.

Because of this, problems with morale can develop between your different departments. The business relies on the sales force selling vehicles as soon as possible, but if the technicians in the service department are taking too long, there will inevitably be some friction. At the end of the day, time to market relies the most on the reconditioning process pushing out vehicles as fast as possible for the sales team.

If you create a standardized process for your back-office, service department, vendors and front-end sales, your time to market will drastically reduce. One of the biggest bottlenecks for used car dealerships and the reconditioning process is communication. Reconditioning management software can bridge the gap between all of the departments, making it easier for information to be accessed, knowing who’s accountable for delays, and getting approvals as fast as possible. It can even reduce friction between departments, by enabling your fixed ops department to set sales department expectations with reliable delivery times for each vehicle.

To make sure all of your vehicles are front-line ready as soon as possible, reconditioning software is an absolute must in this day and age. It’ll create a much more organized approach when it comes to back-office information, vehicle reconditioning, sales and customer invoicing.