A dealer management system changeover is one of the most disruptive events a dealership parts department can experience. Done well, it is a temporary inconvenience that leads to a significantly better operation. Done poorly, it creates months of data integrity problems, inventory discrepancies, and operational chaos that can take years to fully untangle. The difference […]

Taking over a poorly run parts department is one of the most challenging assignments in the dealership business. The inventory is bloated or inaccurate — possibly both. The bin locations are a disaster. The special order shelf looks like a parts graveyard. Obsolescence has been ignored for years. The relationship between parts and service is […]

It happens in every parts department, every single day. You check your DMS, it shows a quantity on hand of 12, you walk to the bin, and you count 10. The instinct — especially for a newer parts manager — is to immediately adjust the DMS quantity down to match what is physically in the […]

A physical inventory is only as good as the preparation that precedes it. Here are the five most important steps to take before your next count — and why each one matters more than most parts managers realize. 1. Run and Resolve Your Negative On-Hand Report Negative on-hand quantities are a symptom of a broken […]

Walk into many dealership parts departments during a busy morning and watch what happens when a retail customer steps up to the counter. The counter person finishes what they are doing — eventually. The customer waits. The transaction is handled efficiently enough, but there is an unmistakable undercurrent of tolerance rather than welcome. The retail […]

In a dealership service department, time is the inventory. Every bay represents a finite number of billable hours in a day, and every minute a technician spends waiting — for a part, for information, for anything — is a minute of revenue that cannot be recovered. The parts department sits directly at the center of […]

Nobody expects a first-year chef to invent a new cuisine. They expect them to learn the fundamentals, master the classics, and execute consistently. The creativity comes later — after the foundation is solid. Running a dealership parts department works the same way, and the sooner a new parts manager embraces that truth, the faster they […]

For most dealership parts managers, the annual physical inventory lands on the calendar like an approaching storm — something to deal with when it gets closer. That mindset is understandable. There is always something more pressing demanding attention today, and six months feels like plenty of runway. The problem is that the conditions that make […]

In the world of dealership acquisitions, very little goes exactly according to plan. Closing dates shift. Attorneys request last-minute document changes. Financing timelines compress. And somewhere in the middle of all that organized chaos sits one of the most financially critical elements of the entire transaction — the parts department physical inventory — which must […]

In Part One we established something that tends to make people in the industry uncomfortable: most Fixed Operations Managers in small to medium sized dealership operations have deep, genuine expertise in the service department and significantly less practical knowledge of how a parts department actually functions at the operational level. To be clear, this is […]