A few days ago, an old friend of mine that’s a top-notch technician gave me a call to ask me a question. He’s an A technician. Not a technician that calls himself an A but really is a B or C. He spent many years working at a dealership, then spent time in his own
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If you’ve been in the service or parts end of the business, you’ve seen it – we’ve all seen it. The ‘it’ I’m talking about is a warranty parts return area that looks messier than the inside of the dumpster at the back of the building. It’s a disaster that can strike fear in the
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In the past I’ve spent much of my time working with dealerships that have out of control warranty schedules. Warranty schedules that could stand your hair on end. Schedules that should have been fixed sooner but things had so far out of line before someone realized it’s too big for them to fix on their
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Training can be a very sore subject with some. I’ve run across this for many years. Budgets and sales are often the first reasons people use to explain why their training standards are not up to where it should be. But let’s talk reality. That’s just lip service. If you consider training as a cost
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For the past few years, state laws have been written and passed to update older dealer franchise laws or current franchise laws some automakers are trying circumvent. No doubt dealers and dealer associations have been lobbying hard for the changes and New York has just introduced new dealer franchise legislation and some of it covers
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It’s not unusual to hear from a dealer owner or service manager that’s about to be hit by an audit that the upcoming warranty audit is random or inevitable. You hear it in his or her voice and they absolutely believe it. You almost want to agree with them since they make such a compelling
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Warranty labor rates in the past five to ten years have become a more difficult and complex issue to deal with. DaimlerChrysler, General Motors and Ford Motor Company have all come out with plans that allow dealerships to get automatic labor rate increases on a yearly basis. The imports have yet to implement such plans.
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In my years involved in warranty administration, I’ve seen the policy of dealers and manufacturers vary widely when it comes to determining which customers should receive goodwill from the automaker and which ones shouldn’t. I have a hard time faulting service departments for not knowing the criteria they should use. Take a look at any
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In the car business, warranty administration is often one of the more overlooked parts of the business. Frequently little attention and oversight is paid to warranty issues and this can have a detrimental impact on the bottom line. Although warranty is not an avenue that we should use to increase profits in the service and
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Since the first car rolled off the assembly line over 100 hundred years ago, cars have been shipped to dealerships by truck. It probably took about a week after that first shipment before a truckdriver tried to pawn off a damaged vehicle on an unsuspecting dealership. One hundred years later nothing has changed. With 16
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