RO Reviews

[bam]

Are any of you Service Managers required to perform daily RO reviews with your service writers?

Every day, I am supposed to divide my RO's by service advisor, log each one of them by listing RO number, miles, how many items, how many menu items, if they had inspection reports, if the customer signed, who the tech was, if something was upsold, if the advisor documented that a customer declined maintenance and some other misc. information.

Then I am to sit down with each advisor and review every RO he wrote the previous day and talk about all of this information on every RO.

This process cosumes about 3-4 hours of my time each day. Are you required to do this? Does it sound reasonable?

[btk]

I do believe in the service manager reviewing repair orders daily and making corrections with the advisor or talking about opportunities. Inspect what you expect. Every problem in any service department is in the repair orders, so it is important that it is monitored. With that said, at some point you need to move past that daily review and get to the point of spot checking repair orders once a week or so.How long that takes is up to the advisors and managers and what the managers expectations are. 3-4 hours is way too long. I can review repair orders and meet with advisors in less then 1 hour. I do not create a log sheet or review every single repair order with every advisor. I look for patterns or look at a process that is not being followed.

[Lhansen]

bam:
How long has this requirement been in place? I too, agree that RO checks are a necessary part of the job, but think how much valuable time is spent on just that one task. Did that result from an audit? When I work with dealerships, I always perform an RO review. This is a great way of testing your processes, as btk commented. Have you asked our GM the reasoning behind this? Just curious.

Linda


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Linda Graham Hansen
Auto Dealer Focus
www.autodealerfocus.com

[fburrows]

This seems a little over the top but I have no idea what problem or issues caused this procedure to be put in place.

I think the question you have to ask yourself is this the best use of my time as the service manager at this dealership. If you would be more productive doing other things then you should put together a list or schedule of those things and present it to your boss.


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Frank Burrows
fburrows@absdata.com

[bam]

It is a mandate from our consultant, fully backed by our owner. They think it is the way to get to 2 hours per RO.

[texaslp]

The review part is probably a worthwhile expenditure of your time, however making the list could very well be done by someone else.

[ttime]

Bam, sounds like you are using the same service consultant as us. Care to mention who you are using?

[bam]

DealerPro.
Is that who you are using?

[GMFXDOPSMGR]

Bam, you could get your system to do this for you in the form of a report. I am on ReyRey, and can form a report for just about anything. I also use an "exceptions" report for certain items on the ro that I like to watch for.

[Scott Nissan]

I recently sat through a Dealer Pro 2 day meeting and Whoa! Bench marks set way too high and out of sight. They get paid a percentage of the gross dollar increase of your department and that percentage is high, so of course they are going to push and set sell high numbers that the owner will buy into. They remind me of Keeps, I have seen many a dealership have a spike in sales over 12 months and then a steep decline because the customers will not tolerate being hammered everytime in. Many owners will only see and believe it after the customers have left and then it is too late and it will take 3-5 years to rebuild the volume back up to where it should be.

The only Consulting company that has impressed me in my 17 years is Atcon. Go check them out at www.atconsse.com and read some of their articles in the library and you will get an idea of the way they think. They have a killer electronic repair order analysis that works off of ADP or R&R that I love using, instead of taking hours to complete a Ro review, how does a couple of minutes sound? They have a free demo, check it out! It will make you life easier!