In Part One we covered the KPIs that separate high-performing parts departments from consistently underperforming ones. In Part Two we tackle the question that every parts manager eventually runs into: which of these numbers does my DMS actually produce, and which ones am I going to have to figure out on my own?
The answer is more nuanced than most managers expect — and it varies more by platform than the DMS providers would like to admit.
What Most DMS Platforms Give You
The good news is that the foundational data is almost always there. Obsolescence reports — parts with no sales activity in six, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months — are standard in virtually every major platform. Special order aging, sales by category, gross profit by category, inventory value summaries, negative on-hand reports, and parts receiving and return logs are generally available as canned reports in CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds, and Dealertrack without any customization required.
Reynolds and Reynolds deserves specific mention here. Their 2213 report provides parts managers with a readily accessible fill rate figure — one of the few instances where a major DMS surfaces this critical metric cleanly without requiring the manager to calculate it manually. If you are on Reynolds, use it. If you are on another platform, you may need to work harder to get to that number.
Lost sales reporting is technically available in most systems — but only if your counter staff is consistently entering lost sales at the moment they occur. In most departments that discipline is inconsistent at best, which means the lost sales report is an undercount and the fill rate data built from it is optimistic. Garbage in, garbage out.
What You Are Going to Have to Build Yourself
This is where the conversation gets real. The metrics that require the most management attention are frequently the ones your DMS is least equipped to deliver.
True first-attempt fill rate — independent of lost sales entry discipline — is not cleanly available as a canned report in most platforms outside of Reynolds. Calculating it accurately requires either a third-party analytics tool or a manager who has built a tracking process outside the DMS.
Inventory turn rate is calculable from data your DMS provides but is rarely presented as a clean, ready-to-read figure. You will need to pull your cost of sales and average inventory value and do the division yourself — or build a spreadsheet that does it automatically each month.
Return allowance utilization — how much of your monthly manufacturer return allowance you actually used versus what was available — almost never appears as a canned report. Knowing your allowance percentage from the OEM and tracking your actual submissions against it is something you will manage manually or not at all.
Wholesale account trending by individual account, parts sales per repair order, quick service capture rates, and any meaningful week-over-week performance dashboard are all in the same category: the data exists somewhere in your system, but the report you actually need does not. The parts managers who track these metrics are almost universally doing it in Excel — or increasingly in third-party analytics platforms built specifically for dealership fixed operations.
The Bottom Line
Your DMS is a powerful tool. But it was designed to process transactions, not to manage performance. The parts managers who consistently lead their twenty groups are not the ones who rely exclusively on what the system hands them at the end of the month. They are the ones who take that data, build something useful with it, and review it on a cadence that lets them act before a trend becomes a problem.
The numbers are there. What you do with them is up to you