Online OE Parts Ordering
"Without increasing the number of vehicles repaired, it's virtually impossible to increase profit," explains Ken McLure, Shop Manager at Moorehouse Body Shop in Indianapolis, Indiana. As if everyone should know this, Ken continued, "And what's one of the biggest obstacle to getting cars out the door faster? Parts – by far. Estimating them, ordering them, receiving, replacing the damaged parts, following up on missing parts, returning the wrong parts. Definitely parts."
So what can a shop do to ensure the parts procurement and management processes runs smoothly, takes up less time, produces fewer parts returns, fewer supplements and helps increase profit?
"Order parts online, of course," said Bill Lopez, CollisionLink Product Manager at OEConnection. Bill expands upon how reducing parts returns and reducing supplements are the ultimate goals of virtually every body shop. Citing a recent ABRN article on the subject, Bill said, "In the John Yoswick article, ‘Say so long to supplements,' several collision shop spokespeople talk about their efforts to reduce supplements. In the article, Mike Quinn, CEO of 911 Collision Centers even describes our CollisionLink online parts ordering service to a tee – with its VIN parts order scrubbing, parts availability and confirmed pricing."
In fact, five of the seven Arizona-based 911 Collision Centers use CollisionLink daily. Paul Casillas works at the Research Court location in Tucson, and talked about online parts ordering. "CollisionLink is key to reducing parts returns and reducing supplements," he explained. "It takes the human error out of parts ordering, makes life simpler, avoids the hassles of returns paperwork, shaves cycle-time off the repair, and then you look like a superstar to the customer and the insurance company." 911 Collision's web site even boasts their vehicle turn-around time is 5-6 days, as compared to the 11.7 day national average.
Ken McLure at Moorehouse agrees that using CollisionLink has provided vast reductions in both parts returns and supplements. He said, "Everything a shop does impacts cycle time. In CollisionLink we found a tool that drastically improves our vehicle cycle time and helps increase the number of cars being repaired each week. The faster a car goes out the door the quicker you can get to another – which all adds to our shop's increased profit."
So how much additional profit can a shop make from reducing parts returns, reducing supplements and repairing cars faster? Ken estimates, "I estimate that repairing just a few additional cars each week can mean an increase of more than 2% of shop profit. If that increase is three to five hundred dollars each week, that's tens of thousands of dollars additional profit each year. CollisionLink is just a smarter way for us to run our business."
Click here to read the full "Say so long to supplements" article
Click here to register for CollisionLink (dealer-provided service)
Click here to send an email to our CollisionLink Team so they can call you
Call a CollisionLink Specialist at (888)776-5792, ext. 1948.
