Creating Lean Dealers

What's in Creating Lean Dealers?

Creating Lean Dealers is a do-it-yourself guide that dealers can use to make such a transformation themselves. Using examples, diagrams and detailed instructions, it explains how to transform service and repair performance. It then describes how the same logic can be applied to all other areas of the dealership to create a win-win-win for customers, dealership personnel and shareholders.

The journey to becoming a Lean dealership starts with a good understanding of two things:

The ability of the processes in the dealership to deliver on time at every step - a measure that authors David Brunt and John Kiff call "Customer Fulfilment" because it is at the heart of what customers value.

The actual demand on those processes and separating them into different types.

The next step is to use these measurements, along with a map of the "current state" of the process, to define and prioritize problems and then address them, along with the teams doing the work, in a structured way using the Plan-Do-Check-Act improvement methodology.

A series of questions then leads the dealer to develop a "future state" of the process - a picture of what the process will look like 6 months from now, when the problems have been addressed and some waste eliminated, allowing more time to be spent creating the value customers want - what Lean thinkers call "Flow. An accompanying action plan lists the "bite-sized steps" needed to make the transformation happen.

But as with any transformation, management plays a crucial role. Without a fully committed CEO leading from the top, improvements are almost certainly doomed to failure. It quickly becomes clear that management must question and sometimes "unlearn" many of its traditional management methods.

At the heart of this is shifting the mindset from managing results to managing processes using visual progress boards (rather than computers) on a daily or even hourly basis - because good results are a direct product of good processes.

About the authors

Information about the authors is available through the hyperlinks below:

David Brunt - contact David Brunt at [email protected]

John Kiff - contact John Kiff at [email protected]

Additional Information