Fill Rates

[Mike Davis]

Does anybody have a "standard" for off the shelf fill rate to the service department? We are a DaimlerChrysler dealership and I haven't found a lot of DaimlerChrysler dealers that track this. Currently I have arbitrarily set a benchmark of 95% overall fill rate and was wondering if their is an industry standard on this.

Thanks


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Mike

[ridge]

Mike,
I'm not sure if Ford Motor Co. endorses this but we use a standard fill rate of 85% off the shelf and 95% same day fill. I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Lee Ridgeway
partsforfords@yahoo.com

[Chuck Hartle]

Hi Again Mike,

Two ways you can look at this....

First, you can look at your status profile report from Chrysler and look at your stock order percentage vs your Daily Order and Special Handling percentages. This will give your a pretty accurate idea of what is percentage is being filled off the shelf just by this.

As you are aware, however, the status profile report is a bit stale by the time you get it in the mail or from your DMM (it is usually 2-3 months behind real time.

Second, look at your management report under "Level of Service". If you use the proper receipting codes for stock orders and emergency orders this will give you a very good percentage of what has been filled too.
A good rule of thumb is to use three (3) receipt codes.
One for Stock Orders
One for Emergency Purchases (Local Same Day)
One for Daily Orders

Your management report should total these figures for you and you can calculate
- your off the shelf fill rate;
- your same day fill rate;
- your daily and special handling orders;

I have gotten quite "anal" about this and I actually track outside purchases from other dealerships in a database completely seperate from my ADP system.

I also use "9" different order prioriety codes to track the method for daily orders such as:
"C" - For Customer Orders in Shop
"W" - For Wholesale Customers local
"SH"- For Special Handling in Shop
"B" - For Body Shop in house
"T" - For Trim Parts
"VIP"-For Car Down Next Day Air
"R" - For Riverside Wholesale Customers
"CC" -Counter retail customers
"UPS"-For UPS shipments out of town

This allows us to separate out our daily orders in the morning by prioriety code and check in the needed parts faster. Also, you can get more than one person checking in one big order.
It also works to track your percentage of daily orders for the shop and you wholesale customers.
Chuck Hartle'

[David S]

Toyota takes a slightly different approach. Ultimately the concern is whether we have been able to satisfy the customers needs. Therefore fill rate by line in immaterial. RO fill rate is what matters. Toyotas guide is to achieve a 90% RO fill rate. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees as to what a filled RO is or is not. And the various methods of tracking Fill Rate will vary the results. For example: A tech asked for 10 parts. You have 9 in stock. The tech says nevermind" I will complete the repair without the 10th part. Hopefully you will post a lost sale but a system like R&R will not link that lost sale with that repair order. If you are using an R&R system with Fill Rate Tracking, and the preceding scenario occurs, R&R will consider the RO filled. Yet if you manually tracked RO Fill Rate I would consider this repair order not filled.

The more parts managers and consultants I talk to about this issue the more views I get. I feel that for us to determine what the RO Fill Rate standard should be the industry must first clarify what the definition of RO fill rate is.

My personal definition is that if 10 parts are requested and they are not all on my shelf at this moment, the RO is not filled. Therefore my RO Fill Rate (Off the Shelf Fill Rate) is 0.

For manufacturers that want to track Same Day Fill. It seems that that would be self-explanatory. But if a system is only comparing parts off the shelf to emergency purchases, would it take into account if the car was a carryover and it took me 1 day to get the parts. And does it even matter to Same Day Fill if it does take a day?

David S.

[Chuck Hartle]

David,
Touche'! Wonderful answer and question at the same time.... Heck, if you had 10 parts but the car wasn't fixed what does it matter? With body shops you can usually carry the metal and get it to them and order the exterior things such as tape stripes and moldings, but when a car is in the shop and you don't have the parts to complete the repair your toast!
Chrysler came out with a new CSI type rating called "FFV" (Fixed First Visit). Many service and parts managers feel the only way to get this score correct is to keep the car overnight and fullfil the service in two days with the car never leaving. Otherwise, your FFV goes into the tank. I personally like this rating because it puts the burden on both the service department and the parts department equally. Service writers can no longer afford to use the excuse "We didn't have the parts" to satisfy an overbooked shop or when they forgot a job.
Anyway, you bring up a excellent point!

Chuck Hartle'