Post-sales, any machine or equipment must undergo regular service to maintain its functionality and efficiency. This is why efficient service is a crucial aspect for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). OEMs tie up with their dealer network, who provide brand-authorized service to the customers. This makes dealers accountable for maintaining service quality and efficiency as it impacts the OEM’s brand value and sales.
To ensure that dealerships comply with the brand guidelines and safety requirements during service, OEMs need to conduct dealer audits regularly. However, the traditional paper-based documentation creates more chaos for auditors and OEMs than convenience. Efficient audit management software like Intelli DVR comes to their rescue as it streamlines how auditors perform dealer audits and generate reports.
Through this article, we will explore how audit management software simplifies dealer audit operations, helping OEMs ensure compliance and make data-driven decisions.
Significance of Dealer Audits for OEMs
The major reason why OEMs conduct dealer audits is to identify the key areas where dealerships can improve. Unbiased, efficient audits help OEMs ensure that dealers perform optimally, follow the brand guidelines for service, and maintain quality.
Let’s understand these benefits of conducting regular dealer audits for OEMs:
Brand Consistency
Dealer audits evaluate dealer performance based on several parameters and check how they carry out service operations. This way, they can authenticate if all dealers adhere to the brand guidelines at all times.
Compliance and Regulations
Transparent and unbiased audits help OEMs authenticate whether dealerships comply with the OEM's brand standards and deliver the same service experience every time.
Quality Assurance
Regular audits help OEMs ensure that dealerships maintain the predefined quality standards during service. It helps in overcoming quality issues that may arise later and cause inconvenience to the customer.
Risk Management
As mentioned earlier, audits help OEMs check and ensure dealers’ adherence to pre-defined guidelines at all times. When dealers comply with brand guidelines and quality standards, it minimizes the risk of defects, faults, or equipment breakdown.
Training Insights
Audits help OEMs identify areas where dealerships lack and prepare training materials accordingly. This helps OEMs to encourage a culture of continuous improvement among dealerships, improving overall service quality and efficiency.
Challenges Auditors Face During Manual Dealer Audits
Dealer audits are a crucial method for OEMs to ensure smooth service operations across their dealership network. However, OEMs may face multiple difficulties when carrying out audits manually, i.e., using traditional paper documentation. Evaluation inconsistency, limitations to capture data, and lack of transparency are a few struggles OEMs undergo during audits. This section discusses the challenges faced by auditors when conducting manual dealer audits in detail:
Inconsistent Evaluation
Manual, paper-based documentation makes it difficult for auditors to access. They need to find the required report across piles of documents and then scroll through numerous pages. As the auditors need to complete the audits within deadlines, it makes it difficult to maintain consistency and audit quality.
Slow Turnaround
Manually recording observations and findings consumes a lot of time. This causes delays in evaluating dealer performance and decision-making for OEMs.
Lack of Visibility and Analytics
Since manual dealer audits lack centralization, OEMs do not have real-time visibility into the audit process. This keeps them from analyzing audit data with ease and instantly looking to previous records. It also makes it difficult to provide genuine feedback to their dealers, hindering their capacity to work on areas of improvement.
Limited Data Capture
Paper-based documentation has limited storage, confining auditors to record their findings within the defined space only. It's also not possible to add evidence like images or videos to support their observations.
How Audit Management Software Overcomes These Challenges?
Auditors needed a streamlined system to overcome these challenges that surfaced during manual dealer audits. The search for a simple and smooth system for dealer audits led to the development of audit management software. This software comes with a digital and user-friendly interface and provides a centralized platform to record auditors’ observations and findings during dealer inspections. This facilitation eliminates the traditional practice of paper-based documentation and improves the efficiency of these audits.
Audit management software streamlines how auditors record dealer performance evaluation based on multiple parameters set by the OEM. Auditors conduct inspections as per the checklist provided to them, ensuring they don’t miss any criteria.
How Does It Work?
An audit management software helps OEMs to focus on these four essential aspects of dealer audits:
1. Identifying Trends
With centralized access to previous audit reports, OEMs can evaluate dealer performance over time. This enables OEMs to spot patterns across dealerships to understand what’s bringing success and what requires improvement. It also helps them identify dealers with a consistently poor performance and take necessary actions.
2. Setting Performance Benchmarks
When OEMs have real-time visibility into each dealer’s performance, it makes it easier to make fair comparisons across dealerships based on factors like region and customer ratings. It also enables them to set benchmarks by identifying improvement practices a specific dealer may have adopted and share them across their dealer network.
3. Enabling Continuous Improvement
This software provides OEMs a complete visibility into dealer performance by helping them track progress over time. Consistent monitoring helps OEMs to evaluate how effective the changes by dealers are, promoting continuous improvement.
4. Making Decisions Backed by Data
Real-time visibility into audit data helps OEMs strategize audit operations better. Analyzing audit data provides valuable insights that enable OEMs to allocate resources efficiently and curate targeted mentorship for their dealers.
Intelli DVR as an Efficient Audit Management Software
Intelli DVR is an efficient audit management software that helps auditors evaluate dealer performance, identify the key areas for improvement, and generate audit reports easily. The analytical capability allows OEMs to analyze dealer performance in real-time and make informed decisions within time. Auditors can add videos and images to the interactive dashboard to support their observations during inspection. It also facilitates communication by allowing auditors to instantly share feedback and audit reports with dealers.
Features of Intelli DVR
Intelli DVR offers robust features for efficient audit management, including:
1. Dynamic Checklist Creation
It’s always good to be prepared to avoid hassles in the last minute. Intelli Manual allows OEMs to create dynamic checklists that they can customize as needed later. These checklists help the auditors to ensure that every step of the audit adheres to the OEM’s brand regulations while maintaining efficiency and consistency across the dealership network.
2. Auditor Management
To carry out dealer audits efficiently, OEMs can assign and manage the auditors. User-friendly navigation of Intelli DVR allows the OEMs to create a dealership master list easily and assign specific auditors to conduct audits based on their locality and availability.
3. Omni-Channel Availability
Users can access Intelli DVR across platforms using its web app or over mobile through native applications for Android and iOS. This convenience allows auditors to conduct audits at any location at their convenience and carry out operations uninterruptedly.
4. Streamlined Re-Auditing
Once the audit is completed, dealers can access the highlighted areas of improvement identified during the audit. Such an approach encourages dealers to make progressive efforts for improvement, enabling a dynamic and iterative development culture.
5. Visual Documentation
To support their observations and findings during audits, the auditors can attach multimedia like images, PDF documents, and videos. This practice ensures complete documentation of audit reports that is also supported by detailed evidence.
6. Data-Driven Insights
Through advanced audit reports, Intelli DVR provides OEMs with data-driven insights on dealer performance in real-time. OEMs can make informed decisions and identify key areas to improve on once they have complete transparency into how well dealers are performing. This promotes a culture of continuous improvement and encourages dealers to provide the best service.
7. Multiple Question Types
While auditing, auditors need to address a long checklist and record their answers in various formats, like simple text, score-based answers, and single or multiple-selection-based questions. To provide this flexibility, Intelli DVR allows users to choose various question types to help auditors easily adapt to diverse auditing requirements.
8. KPI-Based Auditing
This feature of Intelli DVR allows auditors to access detailed KPIs set by the OEM to evaluate dealers’ performance. This performance-driven evaluation helps the OEMs ensure that dealerships adhere to the pre-defined KPIs and sub-KPIs at all times.
9. Image Annotation
This feature allows the auditors to add images in the audit report directly within the mobile app. They can also add comments, highlight issues, or mark images for identification clarity.
10. Digital Signatures
A signature is a badge of authenticity and evidence. Intelli Manual facilitates auditors to back their audit findings by submitting a secure digital signature in their name. This feature promotes the accountability of auditors and improves trust and compliance, all while helping OEMs maintain empirical audit records.
11. Comprehensive Reporting
Auditors can easily generate detailed audit reports and export them to their desired formats, including Excel and PDFs. This makes them simple to share and also to analyze the findings documented.
Intelli DVR: Business Benefits
OEMs experience a large pool of benefits from using Intelli DVR for their audit operations, such as:
1. Speed and Efficiency
As auditors can access Intelli DVR as a simple application on their mobile, it provides them flexibility to conduct audits from anywhere, anytime. It simplifies and speeds up the auditing process and saves the auditor’s time by eliminating the need for excessive audit tools. The mobile-based assessments improve auditors’ overall productivity and efficiency.
2. Paperless Operations
Auditors can record their observations and document reports directly on the DVR platform, skipping the need for paper-based documentation. Not only does it provide a centralized access to all the stakeholders, but it also overcomes the hassle of maintaining paper records that are perishable with time.
3. Customized Reports
Intelli DVR provides auditors to modify the audit parameters for each audit as required. This comes in handy for OEMs when focusing on specific metrics or criteria, or those that might vary due to dependent factors like a dealer’s location or terrain.
4. Effective Communication Among Stakeholders
Auditors can instantly share their findings and observations with dealers and OEMs in the desired formats. This enables OEMs to have quick access to the dealer’s performance, evaluate them, and make informed decisions. On the other hand, the dealers can look into the suggestions and work on the key areas for improvement to ensure compliance with OEM’s standards.
5. Improved Transparency
With a centralized platform and real-time visibility into auditors' findings, OEMs can dynamically evaluate how dealerships are performing. This dynamic access to audit reports improves transparency within the process and avoids the possibility of conflicts.
6. Advanced Analytics
With multiple reporting formats and data-centric insights, OEMs can analyze dealer performance and make informed decisions.
7. Reduced Costs
Elimination of paper-based documentation saves operational costs for OEMs. Dealers can make improvements in the aspects highlighted within the audit report and overcome expensive reworks and penalties.
Conclusion
Audit management software helps OEMs improve the transparency and effectiveness of their dealer audits. This software streamlines inspections for auditors by helping them back up their findings with evidence like images and videos. Efficient software like Intelli DVR provides a centralized platform for communication, enabling the auditors to share audit reports instantly with OEMs and dealers.
Such an organized approach allows OEMs to have a clear view of their dealers’ performance and identify the areas of improvement. When dealers have constructive feedback on areas they can improve that is backed by data, they can make suitable strategies and efforts to fix them. This improves dealerships’ productivity and efficiency by promoting a culture of continuous improvement among them.
Get a free demo today to see how Intelli DVR can streamline dealer audits for your business.
