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Management Metrics

PFW’s Analysis Tools

PFW Password - Winter 2005 So, you have a good feeling that your business has been successful in both creating and leveraging new efficiencies. But from a management level, how do you measure these gains? Thankfully, PFW IntelliDealer contains a host of tools with which to gauge these improvements.

Analysis Tools
The following applications, features and functions are just some examples of the ways in which key management information can be gathered as a means of monitoring efficiency:

PFW IntelliDealer IntelliTech – A strong analysis capability is created in IntelliTech, as managers use the Supervisor feature for views of current jobs, and receive requisite technician and work order details. PFW customers use Supervisor to select those work orders that contain warnings, those that require reconciliation, or those that have slipped past their estimated hour values. As well, service-resource management can be monitored by creating a view to the status of technicians, or even the shop and bay availability of the department.

Geographic & Business Analysis – Turning customer data into customer information is a key to becoming more efficient. PFW customers use IntelliDealer’s Geographic and Business Analysis [Fig. 1] to create customer lists based on purchasing trends. These lists then become valuable attributes when managing customer relationships via sales, marketing, customer service and support.

Lost Sales Analysis – With IntelliDealer’s Lost Sales report [Fig. 2], system users are capitalizing on their ability to create lists by lost sales codes. On the strength of result-coded groupings, dealerships are able to investigate why sales opportunities were missed, and then take the necessary remedial action. Whether the product was not competitively priced, unit availability was lacking, customer preferences were unmet, or other reasons contributed to the outcome, Lost Sales Analysis allows you to create a process by which you can identify what caused this inefficiency.

Warranty Analysis – The sales of extended warranties to your customers is a key revenue generator, and IntelliDealer users are implementing Group Unit Analysis in order to know when basic warranties are expiring. To be effective, you need to know how old your fleet is so you can discover how fast your inventory is turning over, and you’ll also require an awareness of when your customers’ warranties are expiring—and get this analysis over a specific time span, including multiple years. As well, Group Unit Analysis allows for viewing equipment status by note due expiration.

Management Views – PFW-powered dealerships are using IntelliDealer’s Executive Summary as an efficiency check-and-balance “corporate dashboard.” Through timely, company-wide views, managers are able to minimize the potential for service losses through knowledge of the dealership’s open work orders and requisitions. As well, parts and inventory control is attained via full access to the relevant statistics.

Financial Ratios – Financial ratios [Fig. 3] allow you to create comparisons of your performance ratios relative to the business indicators and quotas you need to meet, or relative to AED’s (Associated Equipment Distributors) industry numbers.

Customer Profitability – As of PFW release R6V03, PFW IntelliDealer contains an on-screen report that gives users a ranking of their customer accounts. With the Profitability report [Fig. 4], account sales numbers, costs, margin amounts and margin percentages can be determined, which provides dealers with the knowledge they need in order to know how to prioritize—and generally approach—their accounts.

Custom Financial Reporting – This IntelliDealer feature facilitates the customized retrieval and presentation of important financial information. Dealerships can then use this information to, for example, ascertain departmental performance, with an eye to executing an efficiency analysis.

Empowering Management
When you consider that all of these features and functionalities are available in a combined system, you can see how PFW software empowers dealership managers and executive staff. With these tools, dealership management is eased. It’s now possible to understand your business from the point of view of current and historical performance in relation to the default and user-defined efficiency benchmarks that you know are business-specific and relevant.