Pub. 14 2015-2016 Issue 3

N E W J E R S E Y C O A L I T I O N O F A U T O M O T I V E R E T A I L E R S I S S U E N O . 4 , 2 0 1 5 22 new jersey auto retailer Major Changes How To Cope With BY MIKE NICHOLES When one considers the typical backgrousnd of the dealer, it becomes obvious that for some of the departments; such as new and used sales, the dealer operates from a posi- tion of strength. They have ‘walked in the shoes of the manager’ and, therefore, know what that department is about, what it needs andwhat the challenges are tomake a profit. But in the Fixed Operations, Service, Parts and the Body shopwe are facedwith another problem; all of what is known about themost efficient management of those three ‘fixed’ departments is not ‘first-hand knowledge’ but something gained the hard way. The management of the Parts Department is one that has traditionally been done via the apprenticeship method; learning from the one above you, one job at a time until the level of PartsManager has been reached. Often this is a long process that takes years and if the employee has had good peers that understood the problems and that knowledge was passed down from person to person, they usually fare well in managing the Parts Department and the parts inventory. In ‘ages past’ the factories took an active hand in this training. With the addition of the DMS, or computerized management systems, the DMS vendor often took a hand in the training of the Part Manager. But over the past 10-15 years, that approach has been abandoned by the factory; being replaced with ‘self-learning,’ computer-based pro- grams, or in some cases, not at all. The DMS systems essentially abandoned most train- ing, depending on the ‘previous manager’ to train the new people on the essentials of the In The Parts Department From the beginning of the modern-day dealership, the Dealer Principal has had to deal with the challenge of ‘managing the managers.”