Today’s vehicle dealership faces a multitude of problems: from immobilized parts inventory, to an excess of administrative staff performing tasks that could be automated, to inefficient work processes.
At the same time, dealers work towards ambitious goals: increase sales, improve customer loyalty, reduce costs, differentiate themselves from the competition, and increase their profit margins.
Overcoming these obstacles and achieving these objectives is a difficult challenge that becomes frustrating for many dealers who don’t have a clear and achievable plan.
The best way to address this situation is by combining two components that, from our experience, guarantee a favorable outcome:
- Good processes. This is the foundation that a dealership needs in order to manage the business soundly. When implementing a business system, management must first do two vital things: create and review all of the necessary business processes for each department, and put in place all of the required audit controls.
- A good system. A dealer management system should obviously address all of the demands of the industry, but must be flexible to adapt to the dealer’s specific business processes.
The deployment of a dealer management system must be accompanied by an integral improvement of business practices and processes. It is essential for the dealership and the business software provider to work together on optimizing best practices, creating and improving the business processes for each department, in order to professionalize management of the business.
To achieve this, the DMS provider must have staff that is specialized in the business of the dealership, and who can provide the knowledge needed to improve how the dealership is managed.
