Why the Reconditioning Process is Vital to Used Car Sales

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If you aren’t careful, the used car reconditioning process can greatly impact the profitability of your car sales. The longer a car sits around waiting for reconditioning to be completed, the less profit you’ll make when you finally sell it. When you don’t closely monitor this process, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks and add up to a lot of time and money lost.
​The following are a few ideas for refining the reconditioning process at your dealership:

Putting Procedures In Place
A single car will likely travel through a number of departments (depending on its needs) during the reconditioning process, which makes it easy to shift blame when things don’t go as planned. This becomes harder to do if there are set procedures in place that will track the car along its journey. These procedures hold each department accountable and helps avoid any finger pointing when you try to get to the root of an inefficient recon process.

Collaboration and Accountability
By setting reconditioning up more like an assembly line than a disorganized hodgepodge of service and repair, your entire dealership will reap the benefits. It’s difficult for employees to do their jobs effectively when they aren’t exactly sure what their jobs are and which tasks should get priority. Typically recon is a collaborative process, with different people from different departments completing different tasks. These people also have other functions that they perform within the dealership, all of which can result in a very fractured process if there isn’t a standard for communication and accountability.

Using Technology to Speed Things Up
There are several tools you can use in order to track the cars in the recon process, but none of them provide an Overall Recon Cycle time, Open-job (real-time) Cycle Times and the actual workflow, other than ReconTRAC. ReconTRAC is a simple to use cloud-based software that not only lets you track every aspect of your reconditioning process, but improves it. The ‘hot-potato’ style workflow pushes cars from one department to the next automatically, instead of requiring manager intervention at every turn. If work needs to be done by a vendor, they get a notification to come do their work, and when they hit the ‘complete’ button, that job is sent straight to the next department, which speeds up the process. Remember, the whole point is not just to track the cars, but to improve upon the Overall Cycle Time so you can get the car sold faster.

At Green Cloud, our paperless workflow system was driven by our experiences in the automotive industry. Because we understand the unique challenges you face, we’re able to provide proven solutions that can be customized to fit your needs. Contact us today, to learn more about the Green Cloud Process or to schedule a demo.