Family-owned Motorcars’ goal is to not only use the assembly line itself but also sell the setup to other dealerships.
Taking a cue from how cars are made, a resourceful dealership has created an assembly line for servicing vehicles.
Motorcars Honda came up with the idea in part to speed up its express-maintenance operation. The dealership currently is beta testing the system. It goes live in a few weeks. Longer-term plans are to sell the system to other dealers.
“It hasn’t been done before, and it has turned into an unbelievable project for us,” says Trevor Gile, a partner with his father at Motorcars Honda, located in Cleveland Heights, OH. “We’re still putting the finishing touches on it, but I think we’ve got the secret sauce.”
The line consists of six stations for light service work such as oil changes, tire rotations, tire balancing and express detailing. Vehicles move on a belt from stop to stop. Gile likens it to a car wash.
Each station is the equivalent of 3.5 to four service bays, he says. “Work that could take up to two hours can be done in 30 minutes.”
The operation relies on timely parts stocking. To accomplish that, Motorcars uses Dealertrack’s dealership-management system, the market’s only cloud-based DMS. Dealertrack’s Opentrak integration platform also allows Motorcars the freedom to work with third-party application-providers of the dealership’s choosing.
Using its own data and the Opentrak platform, the dealership created its own software to run a well-stocked assembly line.
“The software keeps things running,” Giles says “The assembly line is away from our parts department, so we had to find a way to keep it quickly stocked. We’re working with a company that provides something similar to a vending machine that will dispense things like oil filters.
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