DealersEdge Professional Forums

how often is everyone overnighting warranty mechanical parts and claiming the freight on the warranty RO, for a vehicle down situation? We rarely do this, if ever, and I was telling my service manager that we should be doing this when needed. Is there any fallback from warranty for doing this?

Every day, every time, customer pay or warranty, when the part will not arrive the next day organically.

Warranty reimbursement or not, the customer needs their vehicle back and pinching pennies on freight loses dollars in profits. Too many Parts Managers with a short term mentality do not realize long term profitability depends on sales. If you make a customer wait to save yourself a few dollars in freight you just feed the perception that dealerships don't care about vehicle owners. While your monthly freight bills will go down so will Fixed Operations retention, customer pay, repeat vehicle sales and overall profits. The freight bills will come down once your special orders are sold and proper demands accumulate in your DMS.

You may also want to take a hard look at your lost sale process.

Every bill it every time that we can, pickup charges as well. I lose quite a few of these charges due to excess loaner car usage, but thankfully we have a great warranty admin who dislikes the service manager and is always looking out for the parts department. First warranty admin that gave parts a slush fund every month.

if we need to then we do it

Case by case situation when we quote parts we also quote an eta on parts so they know if there is going to be a delay, if it is a big cp job i have no problem eating a little freight but to say we do it on every job would be false especially when you cso-3 a part just to find out service let the car go and didn't bother to tell anyone and the part sits on your shelf for over a week

Depends on the ETA, how long the car has been down, how much the customer is investing into the repairs, if we're slammed and need to get it out the door, loaner availability, etc. We split any internal overnight costs between parts and service since it's mutually beneficial.

GM Warranty will not pay for freight reimbursement and a rental. If customer is in a rental we do not overnight.