DealersEdge Professional Forums

I would be interested in hearing from others on how they handle special order parts in there parts inventory. We use a method where parts bins are labeled with the first letter on the customers last name and the special order card is attached to the part and placed in the bin by last name. The parts are posted to our ADP system via the last name and as a NS part. There has to be a better way. Thanks for any help.

How are your shelves organized? Just by The first letter of their last name? Try using 5 sets of shelves and double up on the letters per shelf. Use week #1 A-Z, then the second week of the month use week #2 and so on. Depending in the months cycle after week #4 or #5 you would go back to week #1 and then be able to purge your special orders, hopefully their wouldn't be any left or if so very few. This has worked extremely well for us and to guys are aware of the shelves cleaning themselves off ar they need to call those customers. Try it and I bet you'll get a better handle on the old stuff.

Thanks for the reply. We do a shelf per letter (or a couple), one of the reasons is we have 3 different car lines. Do you combine the car lines?

We also use four bins with five shelves each.
The first week everything goes in bin 1. The second week bin one becomes bin two and all new arrivals go in a new bin one. At the beginning of the fifth week everything in bin four is removed and it becomes bin one.
The bins are marked with the dates of the week the parts arrived. We are a dual store and both franchises are put in the bins together.

If your franchise has a 30 day return policy this will get aging parts out of the special order bin after four weeks and allow you to request returns on time.

We also notify the service advisors of any parts in bin three at the beginning of the third week and usually they can get the vehicles in within a few days. We rarely pull more than five or six parts from bin four.

Joe R

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I found it very helpful to supplement the binning and tranking efforts with 2 customized reports afforded to the advisors daily.
We are on the ADP system and use computer generated SOR's. Using that data base I created 2 "RPG" custom reports.
The first lists SOP's by advisor in order of newest to oldest with customer names, phone #'s, part #'s and description. The second lists all parts backordered with customer name,phone etc.
This eliminated the parts department as the fall guys for info on SOR's.
Now, each advisor was held accountable for his or her own customer contacts! No excuses, no lost cards etc..They had current info every morning on a complete easy to use list.
As parts entered the third week, they were highlighted on the lists, and a last ditch mailer was generated to urge these customers in.
THis method of holding the advisors accountable proved enormously effective! Part returns became negligable.

Glad to see someone finally mentioned a computer system in all this SPO stuff. Your DMS should afford you the option of SPO reports - such as Receipted Back Counter SPO's for your advisors and SPO aging reports so you can keep a handle on your SPO aging. I agree, you must hold your advisors accountable for their SPO's.

At the last dealership that I was at, we used an excellent system of putting all the special parts into our regular inventory with the stocking items. If you are a GM dealer and use group-numeric binning, all the special order parts are added to the system with their proper bin location at the time the part is requested, provided the counterman knows what bin that part would go in,with respect to size, or at the time the SOR's (On ADP) are rolled to orders. If counter people don't know what bin the part should be added to, then they shouldn't add the part to the system. When the manager or inventory control person rolls the next order, they will be prompted to add the (not on file) parts at that time, and if they are relatively familiar with the layout of their dept., they may be able to bin the parts off the top of their head. Otherwise, a bin layout sheet with group listings nearby would be helpful for that person or even counter people.
This process is also effective for finding parts when the computers are down and someone wants to check a number and they provide you with a group no..
If your concerned about these parts not moving, there are all too many ways to run reports of SORs or NS parts with no movement, and identify non-moving parts and either re-notify or return these parts.
Another benefit is that if these parts make phase in criteria, they will automatically go to the proper bins when they finally qualify and get ordered in.
There's several benefits to the process, but not everyone would agree to the approach. You have to look at the numerous ways that this can be implemented to understand them.

Any questions? E-mail me.


[This message has been edited by jdpetey (edited 01-10-2001).]

[This message has been edited by jdpetey (edited 01-10-2001).]

[This message has been edited by jdpetey (edited 02-07-2001).]

For ADP users,

A few years ago I discovered a neat trick using the ADP SOR function. Go to the SOR function and retrieve an open SOR. Now up arrow to highlight a part number, then hit the F2 key. A line detail window will open for the highlighted part number. Right arrow to the bin location and type in anything you want (up to eight digits, numbers or letters). Hit F3 twice to save the changes. What you end up with is an exclusive bin location tied to that part number on only that SOR (the same part number can have different bin locations on different SORs). This does NOT change the system bin. Now here is how we utilize this.

We have some bins (small, medium, and bulk) set aside for special order parts. We labeled each shelf in those bins with a unique number (S01, S02, etc). As special order parts are being checked in they are placed on one of these shelves and the Sxx shelf location, along with the SOR number is written on the packing slip. Right after our inventory clerk receipts each order he then goes to the SOR function and changes the SOR bin location to reflect the S shelve the part it is on. One of the nice things about this method is that we always put new items on the S shelf with the fewest parts on it so we dont end up with some shelves packed while others are almost empty (like when you use the first letter of the last name).

When one of our parts advisors wants to pull a special order part they do one of two things. If there are only a couple of items on the SOR they use the SPI function to retrieve the SOR and then use the F2 key to go into line detail which will show them where each part is located (which S shelf). If there are a large number of parts they go to SPI to get the SOR number and then move to the SOR function and print a copy of the SOR, which will give them the S shelf locations for all of the parts on that SOR (use SOF to add the bin location field to your SOR form).

This system also helps speed up our monthly special order purge. We just run RRS selecting the date range we wish to return and print customer notifications. We now have copies of all special orders to be returned showing the S bin locations. It makes pulling these parts for return a snap.

Email me if you have any questions



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Ed Weirick

I have the new PBS inventory control system, which I believe to be the best system on the market.I can track SOPs in so many different ways, by name, part number, phone, lic#, invoice #, SO# , and so on. I have used ADP & Reynolds & Reynolds, This system was designed for Chrysler & GM dealers, I work for a Chrysler Dealer. This is a windows based system, which makes it easy to navigate through. Check it out @ PBS.COM or email me, for more info.

Partsmanager99:

All I get on pbs.com is newspaper software. Can you give us more information on what system you are using.

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Frank Burrows
Automotive Business Solutions
frank@autobusiness.org