We have various vendors that we use for reconditioning, spread out all over town, and I always had the suspicion that there was lag — delays in vehicles getting frontline ready. My premise was that the time we were losing with vehicles sitting idle, waiting for a different step in the reconditioning process, was costing us money: frozen capital, interest expense on the floor plan, pick your poison. We needed to know where our inventory was and how long it was there.
What the TrueSpot team has been able to do is work with us to understand and develop all of our reconditioning workflows. A traditional dealership has a lot of that stuff under one roof, but we have to use vendors. By installing the tracking equipment at all of our vendor locations, now I have the ability to track it, and I’ve seen results. Just in the last four months, we’ve shaved off two days from our average recon time. That’s 20 percent, and I still think there’s an opportunity to improve from there.