Creating lean dealers

What is in Creating Lean Dealers?

Creating Lean Dealers is a DIY guide to enable dealers to achieve such a step-change for themselves. It works through, using examples, diagrams and detailed instructions, how to transform performance in service and repair. Then it goes on to describe how the same logic can be applied to all other areas of the dealer business to give a win-win-win for customers, dealer staff and shareholders.

The journey to becoming a Lean dealer begins by getting a real understanding of two things:

The ability of the processes in the dealership to deliver right first time on time at every step – a measure that authors David Brunt and John Kiff call ‘Customer Fulfilment’ because it is the core of what customers value.

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

The next step is to use these measures, together with a map of the ‘current state’ of the process, to define and prioritise what the problems are and then address them, with the teams who do the work, in a structured way using the Plan-Do-Check-Act method of improvement.

A series of questions then guides the dealer to develop a ‘future state’ map of the process – a picture of what the process will look like, typically in 6 months time, when the problems have been addressed and some of the wastes eliminated so that more of the time is spent creating the value that customers want – what Lean thinkers call ‘Flow’. An accompanying action plan lists the ‘bite-sized steps’ needed to achieve the transformation.

But like every transformational change, management plays a critical role. Without a fully committed CEO leading from the top improvements are almost certainly doomed to fail. It soon becomes apparent that management has to question and sometimes ‘unlearn’ many of its traditional management methods.

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