Acceleration Awards Winner Spotlight: Rapid Recon

Throughout November, we're spotlighting the winners of Dealer Marketing Magazine's first-ever Acceleration Awards, which recognize automotive vendors that stand out by offering unique products and services for increasing dealership sales, maximizing efficiency, streamlining processes, and most importantly, rapidly increasing profitability.

Today: Rapid Recon

Rapid Recon

Category: Reconditioning Workflow Accountability Software

URL: RapidRecon.com

Contact: (650) 490-4460

The Pitch

The most practical and effective solution to poor used car gross is to recondition vehicles faster. The goal is to operate at an average days in recon (ADR) of three days. Slower speeds waste dollars, labor hours, inventory turns, and sales gross.

Reconditioning workflow-accountability software applies best practice tracking, time management,project control, and holistic communications among the entire dealership to reduce vehicle depreciation costs, increase inventory turn, and improve used car gross.

Dealers using Rapid Recon workflow software are recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by being faster and more efficient moving inventory to the front line.

What Is Rapid Recon?

Since its inception in 2010, Rapid Recon has become the leading time-to-market reconditioning software for new and used car dealerships.

Its benchmarks and best practices help fixed ops directors, general managers, used car managers, and service managers fine-tune their reconditioning processes to achieve faster inventory cycle times, which increases inventory turn and vehicle gross, lowers holding costs, and optimizes service facility utilization. The system is user-friendly, and employee training is quick and easy.

Design

Vehicle inventory is automatically generated and imported from a dealer management system or syndication source. The software is cloud-based, with full mobile and desktop functionality.

Personnel use multiple levels of communication such as text notifications, general notes, estimate builders, digital repair approval, digital imaging, and workflow step management.

Process management

As the vehicle moves through your customized process, text or email notification is channeled to the individual or individuals who need it, just ahead of the physical vehicle move.

The single-point communication provides focused information specific to the step owner(s), eliminating inefficiencies by notifying only the people that are needed for that specific part of the reconditioning process.

There is also a vendor management tool that allows the dealer to tag a vehicle for a specific sublet repair, and when the vendor arrives, provides a vendor-specific list of the vehicles that need their attention, complete with repair-related notes, vehicle location, and pricing.

Automated recall management

Rapid Recon has partnered with Auto App to provide the dealer a fully automated, vehicle-specific recall management tool. The VIN file is scrubbed multiple times per day in every step of recon — even the front line. Also included is a daily email automatically sent to the dealership staff, providing a list of its current inventory that was added to the open safety recall list that day.

Feedback

Each step is tailored to perform within a designated time line. When a vehicle approaches the threshold of each set guideline, it is flagged. That flag is used to generate an exception report that is automatically emailed to the department heads daily. This ensures that the department heads are kept in the loop on real-time bottleneck opportunities, without the burden of micromanagement.

Archive

Because the platform is centralized and digital, the entire vehicle file is automatically archived once the vehicle is sold, where it can be recalled within a few seconds to review all reconditioning information for the next 36 months.

Reporting

Included is a full reporting suite that allows the dealer’s or group’s real-time quick at-a-glance metrics on bottleneck areas, workflow trends, and personnel behaviors.

The suite allows for detail at a global level, with drill-down capabilities that pinpoint the detail of a specific movement, providing the irrefutable accountability on the who, when, where, and the why that dealers and department heads need to get to the source of their bottlenecks.