|  Setting New Standards For Benchmarking! by Jason Belzycki
How ITKonline can further benefit your dealership?
What is your current experience when you try to compare your dealership against current market trends/benchmarks? Are the benchmarks out of date or perhaps not relevant to your dealership?
For benchmarking to offer true benefit to your operation, it needs to satisfy the requirements of timeliness, accuracy, and relevance to your organisation.
The benefits of benchmarking cannot be underestimated. Ongoing changes in the economic and operating environment such as fuel prices, interest rate rises and changes in government policy can all have reactive and impressionable effects on our industry, and inadvertently your bottom line.
In comparing your trends to relevant industry benchmarks, you are able to keep a close eye on the performance of your own organisation to that of your peers and the trends as they unfold. This allows you to fine tune your organisation by dealing with the opportunities and hindrances as they present themselves.
Complete Dealer Services is excited to announce a benchmarking program like no other. By becoming a member of the "ITKonline benchmarker" community, you will have direct and immediate access to the latest market observations with respect to "median" and "best practice" results for motor dealerships in Australia instantly.
For those of you not already familiar with our latest offering, ITKonline incorporates all the impressive tools that we have successfully nurtured and deployed in ITK to deliver Management Reporting for Principals at Motor Dealerships. We have transformed the ITK product into a new, highly intuitive, multi user, interactive, online experience. In taking our "world wide web" experience to the next level, we intend to incorporate up-to-the-minute reflections of what the market is up to via the "ITKonline benchmarker" program.
In determining benchmarks that are truly relevant to your organisation, each individual member of the ITKonline community is categorised according to a number of criteria including, but not limited to:
• State
• Volume (size of dealership)
• Class (Prestige / Dealer / Budget / Truck / non-franchised Sales Yard)
• Demographic (Regional / Rural / Metropolitan).
As a user, your dealership can make choices as to whether you wish to compare results to the specifics above or a wider selection in each case.
Eg. If Sample Motors was a High Volume, NSW Metropolitan dealership, they would have the following choices available to them....
• State - NSW or National (Select - National)
• Volume - High Volume or All (Select - All)
• Class - Dealer or All (Select - Dealer)
• Demographic - Metro or All (Select - Metro)
In making the choices highlighted in brackets above, the system would immediately deliver composite values for both Median (the average result) and Benchmarks (top percentile) for dealers that are a part of the national space. These would not be restricted by dealership size, but are metropolitan dealerships specifically in the ITKonline space. It is also possible to alter the retrieved "Benchmark" to a value that is higher or lower than the default (top 25%) percentile, based upon your organisation's place in the automotive space, and what it should realistically should be attempting to strive for. Additionally, it is possible for us to deliver benchmarks for varying periods including Monthly, Average Quarterly, and Year to Date, so that you can choose which "benchmark" set makes sense to you. The system is fully automated and "live", hence delivering back to you up-to-minute benchmarks. This empowers you to compare your dealership to best-practice dealerships, regardless of size, location and franchise, and offer a truly relevant comparative base to work from. The interactive and timely nature of this initiative sets it apart from any existing offerings in the marketplace today. One of the true benefits is that for the first time, opinion is now separated from fact. The existing practice of industry specialists speculating and delivering benchmarks, will now be replaced with an unopinionated system delivering the numbers. The specialists and dealers alike, will now be analysing and reflecting on the numbers the benchmarker produces. When benchmarks are delivered to you in various forms at present, do you really know what the basis of these figures are? Our new benchmarking initiative is yet another great reason why your should consider ITKonline for all your Management Reporting needs. Check out all the ways that ITKonline can assist you by > clicking here. How much does it cost? After an initial investment into ITKonline, that is centred around the effort needed to get you up and running on the product and to produce management reports, a subscription fee then covers full access to the ITKonline environment on an ongoing basis (including ITKonline Benchmarking). Complete Dealer Services have made a deliberate effort to make it possible to offer the product to you for minimal investment and ongoing cost, whilst maximising the offering and return back to you.
So what should you do next? Our existing ITKonline members need only to register their interest in the program via e-mail, and they will receive the benefits of the reporting program once we launch it (with a critical mass of members achieved) early in the new year. For the rest of you, we would like to hope that we have been seen to be one of the most approachable organisations, so we strongly suggest that you quell your curiosity and contact us!
Please feel free to contact
Jason Belzycki jasonb@cdsonline.com.au
Ron Meyn ronm@cdsonline.com.au
Ph: 1300 765 237
to better understand how ITKonline will take your reporting effort further.
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