Archive for category: Parts

Instore Merchanidising Webinar – March 19th @ 9:00 AM Pacific

March 18, 2013/in Parts, Training/by learningwithoutscars

Don’t miss this lively event.

The days of your customers walking into your business have long since passed. This is truly a shame. Some thirty to forty years ago we taught our customers that our inventory management meant that those parts that the customer wanted would not all be available when they came to our store. So they started to use the telephone and we didn’t see the customer on our store very much at all.

Yet it still continues to be true that you have an opportunity to create an interesting and successful retail store. This is the first step in becoming a retail operation. From Harley-Davidson to Ski-doo to Artic Cat there are specialty suppliers that have made merchandising an art form. We will look into the successes in other Industries and how we can learn from them. The layout of your merchandising area, the methods to keep it fresh and appealing, will go a long way to determining your success. All of this and much more will be covered in this fast paced webinar.

Others dealerships and other Industries have turned this into a customer convenience and money making proposition. This is much more than just setting up shelves and displays. They have made the store a pleasing environment for both employees and customers. Learn the ins and outs of successful Instore Merchandising with this comprehensive webinar.

You can register at aednet.org search products and then seminars to register.

The time is now.

Parts Pondering 2.3

February 1, 2013/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

Walking through airports or shopping malls you see a new item – vending machines that sell other than drinks and sweets. Theses vending machines are a new retail opportunity for some suppliers. You can buy electronics, safety items, communications products and accessories and much more.

This got me to thinking about our business. Why don’t we consider some parts or tools for a vending machine and put them on job sites? I would be very interested in your thoughts and comments on this as I believe that this represents a terrific customer service opportunity which would also produce revenue.

The time is now.

Warehousing

January 30, 2013/in Parts, Training/by learningwithoutscars

The prevalent thinking is that a warehouse is strictly a store room. How wrong can we be?

I remember visiting a consumer goods distribution center in Chicago and watching in awe. The order pickers were given a days work when they arrived and told they could leave when they had finished. There was another visit to a Kodak plant in Stuttgart, Germany which went with no emplyoees at all. No lights on unless someone went into teh building. Finally a tool distribution center with a 30 meter high facility. One of the storage aisles had been out of commission for months until they discovered that there was a deflection on the mast which for safety reasons disabled the motion motors.

Warehousing and distribution centers can be complicated or they can be simple. It is like most things, the more you know the more yioi uare prepared to accept that you don’t know it all.

Join us on our webinar February 13th and learn and enjoy. See you then.

The time is now.

Parts Pondering 2.2

January 27, 2013/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

It is intriguing watching dealers’ worldwide continue to do what they have always done. Why do we assume we know what we are doing when their market capture rate for the parts business is typically less than a third? More importantly many of the dealers have half or more of their parts business coming via their mechanics. It is intriguing.

While that is the definition of insanity it is also a sign that we still are not engaged in trying to satisfy our customer needs for parts. We let more than two thirds of the parts market fend for themselves and do the sourcing and buying of their parts needs wherever they think is appropriate. Why do we do this?

Perhaps because it is too difficult to do it any other way; We have to know our customers, we have to know their buying habits, we have to know our competitors, we have to know how to sell and what to sell. All of that is a lot of work. We will explore this more in coming months.

The time is now.

Time is Getting Short

October 23, 2012/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

Monday November 5th and Tuesday November 6th in Chicago Illinois.

The “New” Quest Parts Management – Unit I

What it looks like when it is Right

A more professional, productive and profitable Parts Operation is necessary for the distributors in the Capitals Goods Industries to be successful. To assist in the development of this Parts Management team we have designed a new series of training courses aimed at enhancing the skills of those charged with this responsibility. The “New Quest Parts Management Unit I” consists of 4 elements presented during a two day seminar.

The Principles of Management

The Basic Principles of Management – what we call the Pursuit of Performance: Planning, Organizing and Control; Job Descriptions and Responsibilities, Performance Standards and Targets – what it looks like when it is right; Employee counseling with praise and constructive criticism in Personnel Management; Time Management to set yourself free; The Business of Change and how to overcome resistance to change; How to survive in spite of ourselves.

Introduction to Accounting & Finance for Parts Personnel

Understand Financial Statements from the Parts Department Perspective. Clear and understandable definitions of the main financial terminology a supervisor/manager must have. Learn the Dealership Financial Fitness Model; and Profitability Pyramid. Asset Management and the value of Return On Assets. Pricing and Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) Discover new truths about the famous “Discount” and the consequences of it on the customer and the business.

The Operational and Process Foundation

Balancing Inventory Requirements with Customer Service: The impossible made understandable. Order Points and Order Quantities; Lead Times and the EOQ; Order Cost and Carrying Cost. Unleash your true power of knowledge by learning the theory of Inventory Control in all its glory. In physical distribution – the job everyone thinks they can do is easy but no one wants to do: Storage systems, transportation logistics; Shipping & Receiving; Parts Office, Sales Counter and Instore Merchandising Design and Layout that makes sense.

It’s All about Customers

Satisfying everyone’s requirements and developing relationships: “Up Selling”, Product knowledge, Features & Benefits selling, and effective telephone techniques. How you should use price as a marketing tool. Instore displays and merchandising; Value added selling; and the value of Customer Retention. Surveys to develop satisfied customers for life: Customer Profiles and all the background required to make customers your apostles.

This “New Quest Parts Management Unit I” provides a broad base introduction to Parts Management for the 21st Century. It is intended for Parts Lead hands, Instore Sales Lead hands, Supervisors, Managers and Executives. The material covers all of the management and operational disciplines required of a Professional Parts Manager.

Go to www.rjslee.com to register under teh Learning tab select Classroom courses.

Shameless Promotions

October 12, 2012/in Parts, Training/by learningwithoutscars

Don’t forget the webinars Monday and Tuesday. One hour of great content for $95/site. You can get more information at www.rjslee.com under the Learning Tab choose webinars and go to parts. You can obtain information about the content and register directly there. The time is now.

Parts Pricing Webinar

October 4, 2012/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

Don’t miss the October 15th, 2013 webinar. It starts at 12:00 PM Pacific time.

Your price is a marketing tool but most of you don’t use it that way. How often have we heard that “your price is too high” or “I can get it down the street for less”? How well customer contact personnel respond to these and other comments about your prices is critically important to your success. The price points you use should be a product of your need to make money and the competitive nature of your marketplace.

Over the years dealers have applied a methodology called “matrix pricing.” This approach started in the 1970’s and it still continues today, well beyond its useful life. We will explain how it works and we will also expose the “new” realities in price theory for the parts business. Looking into the new approach of applying a “array” of variables to develop a selling price; activity, price, competitiveness, and inventory risk. This four element array leads to several thousand mark ups designed to allow the dealer to attach a price that will be competitive while at the same time produce an overall gross profit that allows the Company to maintain the profit required to sustain itself.

Learning the impact of a discount on your business is a critical aspect of defending your price. See the impact on gross profit and net profit. Learning how to respond to price objections and overcome them is a principle that is important to understand and is discussed in this webinar. This webinar will be beneficial for anyone in the parts business that is touching customers with the responsibility for selling or customer service.

You can register at www.rjslee.com under the Learning tab click on webinars.

Parts Warehousing Webinar

October 4, 2012/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

Don’t miss the October 15th, 2013 webinar. It starts at 9:00 AM Pacific.

That big area in your facility stuffed with parts can and should be a showcase for your dealership. A distribution center which has been designed and developed to be space effective, productive and safe is a wondrous thing. Not many equipment dealerships have such a warehouse. Do they? A warehouse stores parts, it requires that there are aisles for people and equipment to perform the order picking and receiving functions as well as the physical counts. It also has to have packing and shipping benches as well as staging areas for inbound and outbound shipments. And finally there are the shipping and receiving docks.

This webinar will present warehouse theory from what the location number should consist of to the sizing principals to use in determining the storage space required. It will expose different picking methods and the appropriate storage media and material handling equipment for each. The metrics of picking and packing, storage efficiency, shipping and receiving and dock handling will be developed.

The overall sizing theory of cubic and square foot requirements for each part number stored and systems to utilize that will tell you which location size should be used for which part and how many of each of these location sizes are required helps with the designs and layouts of your warehouse in a manner that can be used by everyone. This is a commonsense expose of a little understood area in a dealership: The warehouse.

You can register at www.rjslee.com under the Learning tab click on webinars.

Parts Basic Inventory Control Webinar

October 3, 2012/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

Don’t miss the October 15th, 2013 webinar. It starts at 12:00 Pm Pacific time.

Have we completed the transformation of the inventory from being managed by people to being controlled by systems? This webinar will reintroduce the fundamentals of Inventory Control so that everyone can understand why we have the parts we have and don’t have the parts we don’t have. In the market today customers and demanding more service from suppliers and suppliers are shrinking assets at the same time. That is quite a contradiction and one which is impossible to explain without knowledge of the subject. How do we expect the customer contact personnel to be able to serve customers without understanding Inventory Management? This webinar solves that problem.

The basics of order point and order quantity theory will be discussed and explained in a style that is simple yet clear. Lead times, order costs and carrying charges will be exposed and details given as to their content. The fundamental metrics to employ to maintain control of the performance from the inventory rules in the dealer business system will also be covered.

Finally the Backorder Analysis function will be described in detail such that the participants can proceed from the webinar to the operation and conduct this analysis and determine what it is that is causing backorders and what they should do about it. The program will provide you with the understanding and tools necessary to manage a parts inventory more effectively.

You can register at www.rjslee.com under the Learning tab click on webinars.

Parts TeleSelling Webinar

October 3, 2012/in Parts/by learningwithoutscars

Don’t miss the October 15th, 2013 webinar. It starts at 9:00 AM Pacific.

A new reality is approaching, by now everyone has been affected by “telemarketing”. Customers and consumers are starting to resist it. That is clear from the laws that are being presented and passed. Customers want service, they want customer service calls. As a result the rules that are set for your telemarketing program should emphasize your wish to have an effective telemarketing program to provide your customer base with high quality customer service. It can be as simple as a word. That word is tele-selling.

Each person has an aura, a reputation in the company or in the market. This presence is a function of many things; knowledge, personality, the quality of voice, the intangibles of attitude. It is the feeling of trust that the customer has in the person on the other end of the telephone. This is a condition that is earned and achieved it is not something that can be mandated.

In telephone selling the customer either has called with the need or you are calling to see if there is a need. Yet now we confront the dilemma. Rarely, if ever, has anybody provided training on tele-selling. This program will provide you with an outline, an approach, to use when selling on the telephone. This program will provide you with a plan, a structure, and with this structure your tele-selling future can get off to a successful start.

You can register at www.rjslee.com under the Learning tab click on webinars.

TESTIMONIALS

Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023

Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023 offers quotes and words of wisdom from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinson’s, including Mary, who later became his wife.

After the death of Wordsworth's mother, in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years.

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy. Some modern critics suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-1810s, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterized his early poems (loss, death, endurance, separation, and abandonment) had been resolved in his writings and his life. By 1820, he was enjoying considerable success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

Wordsworth's youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge's, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also colors The Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer; the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution; and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem.

Such kind of conversational tone persists all through the poetic journey of the poet, that positions him as a man in the society who speaks to the purpose of communion with the very common mass of the society. Again; "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" is the evidence where the poet expresses why he is writing and what he is writing and what purpose it will serve to humanity.

Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In 1837, the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. "He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well; and when one knows how benevolent & excellent he is, it disposes one to be very pleased with him." William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical "Poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though it failed to interest people at the time, it has since come to be widely recognized as his masterpiece.

Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

To begin, begin.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.

Faith is a passionate intuition.

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.

I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

The Time is Now

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February 17, 2023

Don't miss your opportunity to attend the most comprehensive management training available for parts management and supervision in the Equipment Industry. In Dallas February 17th and 18th. You can register either at www.rjslee.com under the learning tab or at www.aednet.com . I look forward to seeing you there.

The time is now

The “New” Quest Parts Management – Unit I

What it looks like when it is Right

A more professional, productive and profitable Parts Operation is necessary for the distributors in the Capitals Goods Industries to be successful. To assist in the development of this Parts Management team we have designed a new series of training courses aimed at enhancing the skills of those charged with this responsibility. The “New Quest Parts Management Unit I” consists of 4 elements presented during a two day seminar.

The Principles of Management

The Basic Principles of Management – what we call the Pursuit of Performance: Planning, Organizing and Control; Job Descriptions and Responsibilities, Performance Standards and Targets – what it looks like when it is right; Employee counseling with praise and constructive criticism in Personnel Management; Time Management to set yourself free; The Business of Change and how to overcome resistance to change; How to survive in spite of ourselves.

Introduction to Accounting & Finance for Parts Personnel

Understand Financial Statements from the Parts Department Perspective. Clear and understandable definitions of the main financial terminology a supervisor/manager must have. Learn the Dealership Financial Fitness Model; and Profitability Pyramid. Asset Management and the value of Return On Assets. Pricing and Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) Discover new truths about the famous “Discount” and the consequences of it on the customer and the business.

The Operational and Process Foundation

Balancing Inventory Requirements with Customer Service: The impossible made understandable. Order Points and Order Quantities; Lead Times and the EOQ; Order Cost and Carrying Cost. Unleash your true power of knowledge by learning the theory of Inventory Control in all its glory. In physical distribution - the job everyone thinks they can do is easy but no one wants to do: Storage systems, transportation logistics; Shipping & Receiving; Parts Office, Sales Counter and In store Merchandising Design and Layout that makes sense.

It’s All about Customers

Satisfying everyone’s requirements and developing relationships: “Up Selling”, Product knowledge, Features & Benefits selling, and effective telephone techniques. How you should use price as a marketing tool. In store displays and merchandising; Value added selling; and the value of Customer Retention. Surveys to develop satisfied customers for life: Customer Profiles and all the background required to make customers your apostles.

This “New Quest Parts Management Unit I” provides a broad base introduction to Parts Management for the 21st Century. It is intended for Parts Lead hands, In store Sales Lead hands, Supervisors, Managers and Executives. The material covers all of the management and operational disciplines required of a Professional Parts Manager.

January 9, 2014