14 By Marty Hollingshead How to improve by keeping your prices current and competitive Pricing: Hitting a Moving Target Let’s look at a couple of typi- cal examples: Keeping prices current and competitive is the most important and time- consuming and most neglected area of our business. How often do you go through your entire inventory and update your pric- ing? What factors or parameters do you use? Recycler A – reprices his inventory according to it’s age or days in stock. He tries to have the cheapest price. He changes prices on a lot of part types en masse. After all, this is the fastest way to do it. He wants to get through this task as quickly as possible with good results. Recycler B – looks at his inven- tory and uses other factors in his decision-making, such as: quotes vs sales, quantity on hand, part condition, days in stock, and average selling price. He also does parts searches to see what others are selling the same part for. He uses an “apples for apples” approach. He also uses, if he has them available, tools and analytics to identify trending. Trending, when properly applied, is the most reliable and powerful guide in manag- ing inventory for both pur- chasing and sales. This tells us what individual parts are start- ing to trend upward in demand and what parts are trending So, what can our Yard Manage- ment Systems do to help us? As we move forward into an electronic or E-commerce environ- ment, it will be crucial to have good images and descriptions and to have our prices current and competitive. Failing to do this will result in lost opportunities. We’ll never know about them because we can’t trace or measure them. Current and competitive prices For starters, we must make sure we supply them with accurate data - downward. It tells us “what is hot and what is not.” 1. Better Workflow: The need for having the cus- tomer's VIN number is a mandatory part of the order process. When a cus- tomer calls the OEM's for a part request, the first thing they ask for is the VIN number. They do this because they have the build info which we cur- rently don't have. If we had the VIN number it would enable us to verify the year, make, and model. This would lessen errors in ordering and significantly improve our return ratios. While this may seem like more work for your sales- people, this extra time you spend up front would save you a lot in the end. remember: “garbage in, gar- bage out”. We need to fully understand how our YMS works and discuss ideas on how it can be improved, such as by keeping prices current. “As we move forward into an electronic or E-commerce environment, it will be crucial to have good images and descriptions and to have our prices current and competitive.” How to do it