A representative build: a used vehicle operation instrumented at the unit level — true days in inventory, landed cost with reconditioning charged back to the buyer who sourced it, and a recon clock broken into the stages where days actually disappear.
Every metric reachable down to a single stock number
Arrival through merchandising, timed separately
Fees, transport, and recon charged back to the acquisition source
Assessment to deployment, once stage capture was agreed
A store carrying more sixty-day units than it wanted, running the standard monthly aging conversation, and getting the standard result: a markdown on the worst offenders, a resolution to buy better, and the same conversation four weeks later.
Nobody was doing anything wrong. The information available — an aging bucket report and a gut sense of which buyer was hitting — simply could not distinguish a buying problem from a recon problem from a merchandising problem. So each month the fix was applied to whichever explanation was most recently persuasive.
A unit-level inventory dashboard joining the DMS, the inventory management tool, auction records, and internal recon repair orders, with a small process change in the shop to capture stage timestamps that did not previously exist.
Age from acquisition rather than stock-in. The gap averaged six days, all of it depreciation that had never been attributed to anything.
Hammer price plus fees plus transport plus reconditioning, charged back to the channel and the buyer. Two channels that looked comparable on purchase price were not comparable at all once recon was attached.
Arrival to inspection, inspection to approval, approval to start, parts wait, work to completion, completion to photographs. Shown as a distribution, because the average was hiding the tail that mattered.
Investment against a moving market value, so repricing decisions were made against where the unit sits today rather than against what it cost.
Days from lot-ready to fully live: photographed, described, and syndicated everywhere. A ready unit nobody can see ages exactly like an unready one.
Units crossing an age threshold, stalled in a stage, ready but unmerchandised, or overdue a price change against policy. One list, owned by one person, refreshed every morning.
Every wholesaled unit traced back to its acquisition and recon history, turning a write-off into a data point about buying.
Whether markdowns were actually happening at the intervals the pricing policy claimed. Frequently they were not, and nobody had a way to see it.
The recon stage report is the most valuable thing on this dashboard and the only part that required the store to change how it works. The timestamps did not exist in any system; capturing them meant a technician and a porter each marking two additional touchpoints.
We raised this as a go or no-go during scoping rather than building the report and hoping the data would appear. A store unwilling to make that change should not pay for reporting that depends on it, and we would rather lose that piece of scope than deliver a stage report quietly padded with estimates.
What the dashboard does not compute. It will not tell you what a unit would have sold for had it been ready a week earlier. That number requires assumptions we would be inventing, and a figure like that gets quoted in meetings long after the caveat is forgotten.
| Phase | Work |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1–2 | Assessment, metric definitions, and the stage capture decision with the used vehicle manager and service director. |
| Weeks 2–5 | Extracts from DMS, inventory management, and auction records. Landed cost and true days in inventory live. |
| Weeks 4–7 | Stage capture in the shop, recon cycle reporting, and merchandising readiness. |
| Weeks 7–8 | Daily action list, source and buyer scorecards, wholesale post-mortem, and the morning review it feeds. |
About this page. This describes a real build and the decisions behind it. Your sources, your constraint, and your timeline will differ — we are describing an approach, not quoting a project.
Two additional touchpoints, marked by people already handling the vehicle — typically a few seconds each. It is small, but it is not zero, and it only works if the service director is behind it. We treat it as a decision to make rather than a detail to mention after signing.
Yes, with less. Landed cost, true days in inventory, cost-to-market, merchandising readiness, price adherence, and the wholesale post-mortem all come from data that already exists. Only the staged recon breakdown needs new capture, and it can be added later.
Yes, and this matters more than it sounds. Transfers preserve the acquisition date and the full history, so a unit does not become fresh by moving. Groups whose aging report resets on transfer are usually carrying more old inventory than they think.
No. We read from it. It stays the pricing and market-position tool; what we add is the join to DMS cost detail, internal recon orders, and auction records that no inventory tool has access to.
Buying, recon, or merchandising. Send us ninety days of stock and recon data and we will show you the split.
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