Leaders in the Sale of Quality Mopar Parts
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Continued from Page 8 Reynolds and Reynolds’ commitment to a stable core was made evident to us in October while we met with representa ves in their Tampa office. They understood our core business in the parts department and focused their a en on on providing enhancements to our business. We were able to sit down with Jason Sideris, newly promoted Vice President of Fixed Opera ons in Product Planning, and members of his team, Brent McDorman, Adam Kirdzik and Cory Coler. Present in the meetings from the MMG were Rick Cutaia, Kent Cogswell and Marvin Windham. They were eager to talk to us and get our feedback on how we use Reynolds’ solu ons. They showed us areas of the system to take advantage of and gave us a glimpse into their mindset for future development. An example of the refinement they are working towards involves the ERA-IGNITE system. Many of us have used the ERA® “blue screen” for years and are hesitant to embrace the change to IGNITE. The Reynolds team devotes me to study the use of ERA-IGNITE to make sure the system con nuously fits the needs of dealers in a way that ERA blue screen can’t. Their knowledge of the parts department is evident in how they approach this. Each common task in the parts department is evaluated and broken down into individual keystrokes. Then they repeat that task over and over, assessing each step, and look for areas of improvement. The purpose of this ongoing study is to con nue to refine the system and find ways to make ERA-IGNITE easier for the end user. They shared this a en on to detail with us and showed how each task performed in ERA-IGNITE is designed to use fewer keystrokes than ERA “blue screen”. They understand how important efficiency is to the daily operaon of a parts department. I can tell you this was met with enthusiasm by the Guild members as we studied the numbers presented to us. By using keyboard shortcuts and customiza on op ons na ve to ERA-IGNITE, they were able to show an average keystroke reduc on of 42%. Brent McDorman and Adam Kirdzik took note of areas of keystroke inconsistencies on different screens and vowed to look at resolving those when possible. We talked at length about how much power users rely on muscle memory for speed. One of the best features they shared with us was making use of the Create Credit Memo op on only found in ERAIGNITE. Using this feature can turn the daun ng task of manually entering all the customer and part informa on on a credit memo into a few simple clicks to complete. We also discussed the Retail Markup Op on, and how a small automa c price change can add up to big dollars. Each of us represen ng the Guild at the mee ng are currently u lizing this tool. On average a parts department selling 10,000 parts a month can see an addi onal $12,000 in profit over the course of a year. What this tool does is takes the ending amount of your calculated parts prices and will either round up or add an incremental amount to the selling price. Continued on Page 10
The exchange of information by like sized dealers in a non-competitive environment.