Parts Manager Jamie Oyler has been with Toyota of Killeen in Killeen, Texas, for eight years. The two-man parts operation augments a service department with 18 bays and 16 employees. He spoke to Aftermarket Business World about the impact of the recent Japan earthquake, and his approach to inventory management.
As a parts manager, what’s your biggest challenge?
Right now, really, it’s insurance companies pushing for aftermarket and used parts for collision repair.
There’s the ups and down in the economy, the fluctuations. You get your inventory up to a point for doing a certain amount of business, and we’ve had to adjust our inventory and get it back down to the current demand. The business hasn’t been steady enough for us to have as much control over the inventory as we like.
We have it where it needs to be right now. It just took a while after the economy dropped. It took about 18 months to get the inventory down to the level of business we were doing.
Do you offer aftermarket parts?
We don’t use aftermarket parts on Toyotas. We do work on some other makes and models, and we give the customer the option at that point.
For our body shop/wholesale accounts, there’s a lot of aftermarket parts use. It’s not unusual for us to get an estimate with 10 parts, and three of them are an aftermarket or used part that the insurance company wants them to use.
Do you use a perpetual inventory process?
We do perpetual inventory. We have a parts driver, and when he’s not delivering, he has a list of bins he counts every day.
We used to do an annual inventory. I’ve been here eight years, and for first four years we did one every year. It was so close to the perpetual inventory, we found we didn’t need to shut down and do one every year. We do one every two years now and it’s still just as close.
Is business starting to recover?
This is the first year where we’ve seen some good growth. The last two years have been off. Business dropped, and it just stayed at that level for two years. Now we’re starting to pick back up and get close to what we were doing before.
How closely do you work with service to ensure you have the right parts on hand?
Any time a repair order is generated in service, we are notified in parts. That gives us the opportunity to pre-pull parts for the technicians if we know who is assigned to the job. We just try to be proactive in getting parts out of the door rather than having techs sit there and wait on them. We try to get parts to them rather than having them come pick them up from us.
Parts Manager Jamie Oyler has been with Toyota of Killeen in Killeen, Texas, for eight years. The two-man parts operation augments a service department with 18 bays and 16 employees. He spoke to Aftermarket Business World about the impact of the recent Japan earthquake, and his approach to inventory management.
As a parts manager, what’s your biggest challenge?
Right now, really, it’s insurance companies pushing for aftermarket and used parts for collision repair.
There’s the ups and down in the economy, the fluctuations. You get your inventory up to a point for doing a certain amount of business, and we’ve had to adjust our inventory and get it back down to the current demand. The business hasn’t been steady enough for us to have as much control over the inventory as we like.
We have it where it needs to be right now. It just took a while after the economy dropped. It took about 18 months to get the inventory down to the level of business we were doing.
Do you offer aftermarket parts?
We don’t use aftermarket parts on Toyotas. We do work on some other makes and models, and we give the customer the option at that point.
For our body shop/wholesale accounts, there’s a lot of aftermarket parts use. It’s not unusual for us to get an estimate with 10 parts, and three of them are an aftermarket or used part that the insurance company wants them to use.
Do you use a perpetual inventory process?
We do perpetual inventory. We have a parts driver, and when he’s not delivering, he has a list of bins he counts every day.
We used to do an annual inventory. I’ve been here eight years, and for first four years we did one every year. It was so close to the perpetual inventory, we found we didn’t need to shut down and do one every year. We do one every two years now and it’s still just as close.
Is business starting to recover?
This is the first year where we’ve seen some good growth. The last two years have been off. Business dropped, and it just stayed at that level for two years. Now we’re starting to pick back up and get close to what we were doing before.
How closely do you work with service to ensure you have the right parts on hand?
Any time a repair order is generated in service, we are notified in parts. That gives us the opportunity to pre-pull parts for the technicians if we know who is assigned to the job. We just try to be proactive in getting parts out of the door rather than having techs sit there and wait on them. We try to get parts to them rather than having them come pick them up from us.
