Important – Training Tidbit #4

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Don’t miss the upcoming webinars. Go to www.rjslee.com under the learning tab or www.aednet.org under products tab find Product Support.

For the Parts Department personnel

  • February 12th
    • TeleSelling
    • Basic Inventory Control
  • February 13th
    • Warehousing
    • Pricing

For the Service Group personnel

  • February 19th
    • Inspections
    • Work Order Process
  • February 20th
    • Service Organization
    • Labor Efficiency

Those of you that have not attended one of these informative webinars should make the time and register. You won’t be sorry. The time is now.

Warehousing

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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 Pricing February 13th 12:00 Noon Pacific

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Pricing – WP4

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.

 

Warehousing February 13th 9:00 AM Pacific

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Warehousing – WP3

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 common sense expose of a little understood area in a dealership: The warehouse.

Basic Inventory Control February 12th 12:00 Noon Pacific

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Basic Inventory Control – WP2

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.

TeleSelling February 12th 9:00 AM Pacific

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Tele-selling – WP1

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.

Training Tidbit #3

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Webinars are a terrific tool to transmit information to people doing the job. Our webinars last about an hour, are subject specific, allow more than one person in the room and are inexpensive at $95.00.

They are the usual format. It is a GoToMeeting style with slides showing bullet points related to the topic being discussed. There is a short Q&A at the end to allow for clarification or expansion on the topic at hand.

In February we are offering a series of webinars on the operations of a Parts Department as well as the operations of a Service Department in the Capital Goods Industries.

For the Parts Group

  • February 12th
    • TeleSelling
    • Basic Inventory Control
  • February 13th
    • Warehousing
    • Pricing

For the Service Group

  • February 19th
    • Inspections
    • Work Order Proces
  • February 20th
    • Service Organization
    • Labor Efficiency

Those of you that have not attended one of these informative webinars should make the time and register. You won’t be sorry. The time is now.

 

 

Last Chance until December

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You can still register for the webinars Monday and Tuesday. But time is short. Go to www.rjslee.com under the Learning tab choose Webinars and then go to Parts. The registrations will take you to the AED site. See you then.

Shameless Promotions

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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.

Education #11

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In 1987 Allan Bloom the landmark “The Closing of the American Mind,” then last year Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published their landmark study of collegiate learning, “Academically Adrift.”  So starts an article in the National Review on October 15th, 2012. I won’t dwell on the article other than to extract a key metric. (Those of you interested in learning will find the article refreshing in its candor and I believe enlightening.)

The key metric I want to refer to is the “Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). The CLA measures what American undergraduates learn in college. In the work of Arum and Roksa they find that 36 percent showed “small or empirically non-existent” gains in “general collegiate skills” – critical thinking, complex reasoning, writing, and computational skills – after four years of college. Rather astounding don’t you think? The article goes on to identify some of the reasons for these poor results. I don’t think you will find there is much that is a surprise to you.

Meanwhile in the Texas legislature there are efforts underway to pass a law requiring all students at public colleges and universities requiring all students to take the CLA during their freshman and senior years. “Every institution would be called to account for how much students learn under their tutelage.” “The CLA would ultimately serve as an alternative credential to the bachelor’s degree.” “This would help students, parents, and legislators to take a more open-eyed view of the current state of higher education.”  This might also begin to allow more parents and educators to come to the conclusion that specific technical learning is an important alternative to the sacred cow thinking that everyone should have a college degree. The time is now.