See How Birkey’s Uses TARGIT to Monitor Performance and Boost Efficiency
In today's fast-paced business landscape, heavy equipment dealerships are increasingly recognizing the value of timely, accurate data.
Data is essential for monitoring daily performance, making informed decisions, and optimizing various business processes. And to leverage this data successfully, dealerships need a dedicated Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics solution that automates reporting and provides employees with actionable insights.
In this article, we will explore four ways heavy equipment dealers can use BI to uncover new opportunities, drive continuous improvement, and accelerate growth in every department at their dealership.
#1 Inform Decisions With the Latest Data
Ideally, every business decision made in your dealership — from daily decisions about staffing to executive-level strategies — should be based on accurate, up-to-date data from your operations and the market.
However, legacy reporting tools typically rely on manual data collection, reconciliation, and inputs from data analysts. This process leaves critical gaps in your data and delays report creation by weeks or even months, which makes it nearly impossible to make timely, fact-based decisions.
Fortunately, a dedicated BI solution enables heavy equipment dealerships to make informed decisions by equipping them with valuable insights derived from data analysis. By leveraging BI tools and technologies, you can automatically collect, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources, including their dealer management system (DMS).
This data-driven approach to decision-making ensures every employee at your dealership always works from a single source of truth that accurately reflects the latest information in your DMS, ERP, and all other systems. It also gives you access to essential data within the decision window, so you can react to changes or anomalies as they are happening, not months down the road.
#2 Improve Efficiency and Optimize Processes
BI plays a crucial role in identifying inefficiencies within various processes and procedures at heavy equipment dealerships. By analyzing data on overall performance, cycle times, and resource utilization at the department level, your dealership can pinpoint areas that require improvement.
Reports and dashboards help you find process bottlenecks, redundant steps, or deviations from best practices, allowing you to streamline processes and increase your operational efficiency. The continuous monitoring and analysis of your business processes allows you to easily identify opportunities for improvement and implement changes that drive positive results.
For example, you can use a BI solution to generate reports on your rental fleet’s financial utilization, washout percentage, and maintenance-to-income ratio, which will allow you to see where your fleet is performing well and where you might be losing money due to unused equipment or excessive maintenance costs.
#3 Track Key Performance Indicators
Every business is managed by various success metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), that serve as benchmarks or goals for performance. Heavy equipment dealerships often have specific KPIs for each department, as well as several organization-wide KPIs they strive to monitor on a routine basis.
A BI solution gives you the means to track relevant KPIs across various functions within your dealership. You can create designated dashboards for sales, service, rental, finance, and all other business areas, as well as an executive dashboard your leadership team can use to get a complete overview of how the business is performing.
These dashboards enable the daily monitoring of key metrics, which helps managers make proactive decisions and find potential concerns that require attention. Dealerships can use this information to set targets, track progress, and identify areas for process improvement.
#4 Identify Trends and Generate Predictive Insights
While BI is essential for daily performance monitoring, an effective BI solution also helps heavy equipment dealerships uncover valuable trends and patterns in their data, enabling them to anticipate future outcomes and take proactive measures.
By using predictive analytics and data mining techniques, dealerships can spot patterns that may affect their processes and procedures, such as changes in customer buying habits, seasonality, or differences in performance between multiple dealership locations. They can then use these insights to adjust their operations accordingly by switching up their inventory or hiring more technicians to meet a seasonal spike in service orders.
These insights can also help dealers get ahead of potentially detrimental trends that originate within their business, such as declining efficiency in the service department, higher operating costs, and other critical measures that will quickly impact profitability if they go unchecked.
Realize the Full Value of Your Data With TARGIT
Data analysis is a powerful tool for heavy equipment dealerships looking to improve their business processes and make data-driven decisions across operations. But to realize the full value of your data, you need a solution that meets the unique specifications of your industry and business environment.
TARGIT’s specialized BI solution for heavy equipment combines powerful analytics capabilities with a user-friendly interface that puts decision-leading insights in the hands of every employee.
Your teams can use TARGIT’s automated reports and dynamic dashboards to measure performance, monitor results, and uncover trends in every department. Plus, our solution seamlessly integrates with your DMS and all other data sources, so you can always get an accurate, complete view of your data from one single location.
Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how Birkey’s Farm Store got introduced to TARGIT’s BI solution and how they currently use dashboards and reports across their operations. During this Q&A session, you’ll hear from Birkey’s Director of BI and Director of Parts & Services on how their teams use TARGIT to monitor performance and boost efficiency in the service department.
