Quick Lube inventory

[WhoParted]

We recently opened our quick lube shop and my SM wants us to stock filters and gaskets so the guys can get vehicles out quicker. I don't mind stocking the stuff down there but how can I make sure that the filters/dpg/oil gets charged out, and the correct ones?

Any help is appreciated

[Bailo1]

Good luck with that! The previous dealer I worked for stocked their qlube with oil and air filters and it was a constant battle. Only way I know to keep your inventory accurate is to do a lot of counting...at the end of every week have a counter man go over there and do a quick count to see where you're at. The better your service writer/tech who works over there is, the better the chance your inventory won't be all jacked up.

We're about to open a qlube for the first time here as well and I managed to talk the owner out of stocking any parts over there. I realize it will cut down on productivity a bit to have a tech run back and forth for filters, but I don't really think we can afford a bunch of missing inventory because guys who don't work for my department could care less about my inventory.

[WhoParted]

Thats what scares me, these techs are fresh out of school and like you said, could give a sh!t about my inventory.

[X476]

We had this at previous store. I put an inventory of X amount of each oil filter and wiper blades in qlube stall. Every night at 5:00 I would go out and inventory the stock then matched it to the oil changes done and posted that day. First 2 shortages I ate after that service was charged for ALL shortages. Didn't take long for SM to get the Lube Dudes to get it correct.

[cville1987]

We have a fluid management system, so they have to call us to get the oil sent to them. They tell us the RO #, fiter # and how much oil. They have a phone right there, and an oil filter book and a PC for looking up capacities. The filters are in a locked metal cabinet. Once a month the filters are counted out there and inside, and all shorts are billed to service and all longs are credited to service on the same invoice. Billing them to service insures the SM will hold his people accountable. It has worked for many years. The fluid management system is expensive if you don't already have it, but well worth it in the long run to prevent oil shortages.

[PartsPlant81]

Put all of the quick lube stock in a seperate source and like previously mentioned I would use Bin Location 2 or 3 as either Q, QL or QUICK so you can easily run a bin report on all of the inventory and do bin checks as needed.

[fuzzmanmatt]

Grainger offers vending machines that require a passcode for each item. I wonder if it'd be possible to get something like that, requiring the RO# to be put in and integrating with the DMS to automatically bill the oil and filter. Probably too much work, too much investment, too much bullcrap from up above to make something like that actually work.

[tmundal]

Does a copy of every RO print in parts? If not, maybe turn that option on. Thats what we do. RO gets written, we get a copy, and bill out all the parts. Our QL gets a case of each filter as needed. If our count is off, they get charged to service. We also have a fluid management system. Requires an RO # and automatically bills out how ever many quarts of whatever oil on the RO. If like us you are doing 100+ lubes a day you are inevitably going to be off somewhere on filters, but more often than not we end up adding filters back into inventory. We only give the QL oil filters, and only for Toyota. We keep all air/cabin and napa oil filters in parts and they have to come get them.