Standard Times – Does Your DMS Pass the Test?

Many Dealer Management Systems (DMS) allow a dealer to access a manufacturers’ information on standard times that are used to reimburse the dealers for warranty work. There has long been disagreement as to whether the time provided is adequate. That having been said it is also true that someone is trying to help a dealer in establishing standard times for repairs – the suppliers.

So what if the time is inadequate? Or in some cases it might be too generous. That just means you need to do a little more work. Meet with your technicians and determine the factor to apply to the time in order that the work can be performed within the time, consistently, and allow you to develop a labor schedule to follow. Well this is where the DMS has to allow the dealers to apply factors to the times provided with the supplier interface and create dealer time files. Does your DMS allow this? Don’t you think it should? When you have reasonable times to apply to a job assigned to a technician you can build a schedule. With a schedule you can develop a completion date for all work. With a completion date that you can meet consistently you will get more business. Isn’t that what you want?

I suspect you should pose this question to your DMS provider. Can you take the standard times provided for warranty and apply a factor by component code, or operation, or a machine group or even machine model. If you can’t I submit to you that it is important to be able to do this simple thing. The time is now.