DealersEdge Professional Forums

Does anyone have a good template or example of a disclaimer for customer supplied parts? Seems like its happening more and more lately. Also, are you charging more when a customer brings their own parts. We were thinking about bumping labor 15-20 dollars an hour.

I put this together one day. Service had no desire to use it.

Customer supplied items policy

We understand your desire to save money. We make every attempt to give you the most Acton Advantage for your purchase. Some of the advantage is not tangible and is how we stand behind our work. When you supply your own parts you have introduced an aspect that we cannot control or stand behind. Therefore we want to make you aware of our policy for this situation.
I am aware that in supplying my own parts and fluid that I ultimately am responsible for any labor even if the item I supplied is not correct. In the event the item supplied is wrong, not enough items are provided to complete the repair, and it causes a repair bay to be unavailable for other repairs I will be charged for the time the bay is tied up. The repairs will not carry any warranty for parts or labor. Any warranty is between me and the manufacture of the supplied items.

Customer installed items
I am aware that if I installed items on my vehicle and am requesting programming only that I ultimately am responsible for any time spent or failed items in the event the update is not accepted or causes other items to fail. In the event that it causes a repair bay to be unavailable for other repairs I will be charged for the time the bay is tied up. There is no warranty on any parts or labor.

Completely reasonable document, Stevenspeaking. Well put.

looking for input from other parts managers on how you handle this situation??? it seems to be happening more and more in our shop.. My service manager is also the parts and service director so he is my boss.. He does allow it on a case by case basis.. it seems to me that the cases are becoming more frequent... I guess my point is that if a customer is allowed to do it once then why not 2,3,4 or five times.. And if one customer is allowed then why not all? And if all are allowed then I guess the parts department is no longer needed.. Sorry for the error, the parts dept will still need one guy to hand out the oil filters... we currently have no way of tracking how many times this is happening.. To me it is like having a wine cellar in your restaurant valued at a half million dollars and allowing customers to bring their own wine if they request it { got the wine cheaper on amazon } so my question's to all of you is.... Do you allow it? Under what situations? Do you price match? Are your profit margins shrinking? How do you plan to address this issue going forward?

We don't allow it.

I would speak to the GM and explain what's happening and how you are losing $$ from this practice.

Rarely occurs here so it's not an issue when it does pop up.

Even when our sales department get's their own stuff, I'm given the invoice and mark it up appropriately.

It helps when every dept gets it

Our used car dept has a guy stop in weekly to cut them keys for used cars on the lot. When I stated my objection to this with the GM and the DP I was told they would look into it and nothing ever happened, except now he pulls into the back lot. So we don't see him

X476 wrote:Our used car dept has a guy stop in weekly to cut them keys for used cars on the lot. When I stated my objection to this with the GM and the DP I was told they would look into it and nothing ever happened, except now he pulls into the back lot. So we don't see him

That just came to head at our sister store. From my understanding, parts lost that battle even though they recently dropped almost 10 grand on a new machine. They claim it's easier to have the guy cut all the keys at once. Maybe it is, but they're screwing their own parts department. I'd be making it up other ways if it was our store.

We cut all keys here though at least

We cut all of our keys in house aside from the laser cuts. We order the laser cuts from GM. Haven't had a problem yet.