Variable Operations Activity
Reporting Best Practices… By Kim Dean

No more white boards! No more spreadsheets!

BTW encapsulates all of your analytical needs to ensure that you maintain the appropriate balance of stock, and have the appropriately performing team to deliver the sales appropriate to that stock investment.

The list of ideas below show how truly flexible and capable BTWonline is in facilitating the optimal management of your resources.

As an existing client, we can implement any of these “Best Practices” into your BTWonline experience, and we additionally challenge you to review all your existing manual processes and procedures in your organisation and see whether BTWonline can offer the solution in an improved manner.

…Your Delivery Books (sales reporting)

You are just a click away from an interactive experience that provides an accurate account of your orders and deliveries. As Expected Delivery Dates and Estimated Grosses are captured either by manager manipulation or automatically from deal registers, the system reflects an expected position, no matter how long it takes for Administration to process deals.

Your Delivery Books will reflect a realistic viewpoint departmentally and where appropriate, across the organisation, incorporating all Finance, Insurance, Warranty and AfterMarket activity.

By taking advantage of the reporting engine inherent in the product, it is also possible to break up and summarise the performance of your businesses in ways including but not limited to;

In offering filtering of key information, it is also possible to drill into the detail to focus on a particular aspect of your delivery books as well as Report on a sub-set of data.

By additionally allowing sorting of key detail, it is also possible to rank and group the lists as well (any field that can be filtered can also be sorted).

… Order Activity (sales performance)

BTW intuitively delivers default date ranges to make it possible to provide instant selections that can reflect your salesman and departmental activity over a range of periods with a single click.

The Date Ranges on offer include Daily (including Yesterday & Today), Weekly (to easily determine the weekly progress from Monday to Today), and Monthly (From the beginning of the Month to the projected end of Month).

In building Selections that are tuned to these Date Ranges , it becomes easy to determine activity over period such as

1. Yesterdays Orders
2. This Weeks Orders
3. This Months Orders (similarly, it is possible to provide equivalent selections for Deliveries).

Furthermore, if you wanted to view a collection of orders for an extended period (say the weekend), you can override the default dates to deliver the altered view.

Ie, On a Monday morning you could change the default “Yesterday” value from the Sunday date to the day before, and you could then determine the Orders for the weekend just gone.

… Stock Analysis (stock performance)

Are you able to analyse and compare (by a number of factors) your existing stock mix against relevant Sales History?

BTW makes it possible for you determine where your volume of sales and margins have historically come from against your current stock mix, and allows you to make informed decisions about what stock should be kept, sought, and disposed of on an ongoing basis.

… Pre-delivery / Reconditioning register

With current information about order and delivery books available to BTW, it can become a straightforward exercise to offer a cutdown “login” to your Pre-delivery and reconditioning departments so that they may be able to determine which cars to prepare in sequence of priority by Delivery date and time.

In maintaining a User defined field (UDF) field inside BTW that allows the Stock Controller or Departmental Manager to provide instructions to the relevant service department, BTW can neatly control and automate the preparation process.

… Customer Delivery schedule

BTW can easily facilitate the scheduling and timing of delivery of cars by ensuring that staff and resources (delivery bays for instance) are available. By maintaining User defined fields (UDF's) for Scheduled Dates and Times in BTWonline, selections that offer the delivery schedule to staff and managers can be maintained to make those nasty whiteboards disappears from your clean white walls.

… Floorplan / Holdback control

In knowing all of the stock and knowing when it is being sold, BTWonline could manage all of your floorplan activity including payouts.

The appropriate person at your dealership can flag each vehicle as it is bailed with a date and value.

In knowing what cars are sold and when, BTWonline can automatically deliver a list of vehicles delivered but not paid out at any time, and as the payment is made, the appropriate payment date (and report) can be updated.

In a similar manner, all Holdback or Bonus activity can be similarly managed, and reconciliations can occur at a later point directly off statements from the relevant sources.

…A Case Study: - Interacting with BTW to understand why Vehicle Gross may not be as expected…

You firstly choose the Selection titled “New Delivery Book”. The resulting list of deals reflects an accurate account of the current state of affairs as it includes deals:-

1. Delivered and processed in accounting,
2. Delivered but unprocessed in accounting
3. Sold and yet to be delivered

Upon review of the totals, you notice that your Gross per unit is $1,000 where you would expect it to be closer to $1,500.

You review a “by make” report that summarises and subtotals the units, gross and delivers an average gross per unit by Make.

In identifying which make is not performing, you close the report and in the main BTW screen, filter the “New delivery Book” selection by the suspect make.

You notice that there is a mix of Retail, Fleet and Government deals and decide to filter the list further by Sale Category to pick Retail Sales only. The average gross is still not as you would like it

To identify which particular deals were below your expectations, you choose to sort the list by vehicle gross, and notice that a salesperson's initials comes up in more than one instance at the lower end of the list of deals by gross.

So finally, you filter the existing list (already filtered by make and sale type) to hone in on all deals for a particular salesperson.

In this case study, BTW has intuitively allowed you to pinpoint the reason why a part of your operation is not performing by allowing you to easily reorganise the complicated information in such a way that: -

With all of the deals available for review for that salesperson, you are in a position to walk through every deal and review the details accordingly for direct scrutiny with that salesperson.