Is your Hold for Parts number above 12%

By Bud Karakey, BEI Services – In a typical month, BEI Services monitors over 800,000 service calls, performed by 14,000+ technicians. One statistic we watch closely is the percentage of calls a service team cannot complete because they don’t have the right part. That’s right, the dreaded Hold For Parts (HP) call status. What strikes us about HP is that almost 30% of dealers have their HP number below 12%. These dealers get an “A” on their report card when it comes to HP. You can never eliminate your HP because it would be impossible to have the exact inventory, all of the time. It’s a balancing act. But getting the right balance like our “A dealers,” can save you between $40,000 and $80,000 for every ten technicians you employ. Have you been asked to cut expenses lately? Read on.

If you are not in that group of A dealers, then it’s easy to quantify just how much your inventory issue is costing in terms of extra service calls per month.

The median dealer in our database has an HP rate of 21%. The difference, however, is not 7%, it’s 50% because the median dealer has to register a call as HP, 50% more often than an A dealer! How can we assign a cost to the difference in HP?