TMI / DEALERS + DISTRIBUTION
TMI helps dealers and distributors see parts, service and whole goods as the three different businesses they are, with margin, inventory and warranty readable by department rather than reconciled once a month.
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WHY THIS IS EXPENSIVE
A dealership or a distributor is not one business. Parts is a stocking and velocity business. Service is a scheduling and labour business. Whole goods is a margin and trade-in business. They share a building, a phone number and a general ledger, and they are usually measured as though they were one thing.
The people are rarely the problem. The counter knows which part actually fits, the service manager knows which job will overrun, and the salesperson knows what the trade is really worth. What leaks is everything that depends on those three knowing at the same time: a service job waiting on a part that was never ordered, a warranty claim that aged past the window, and a whole-goods deal priced against a trade-in valued from memory.
A bin says four, the shelf has one, and the counter learns which numbers to trust and which to go and look at. Once staff stop trusting the system they work around it, and the system gets worse because nobody is correcting it any more.
Manufacturer claims have deadlines and documentation rules. A claim that sits unfinished because the technician's notes were thin is not a disputed claim, it is a donation, and it rarely appears on any report as a loss.
When parts, service and whole goods are reported together, a strong parts counter can hide a service department running at cost for a year. The blended number looks acceptable, so nobody goes looking.
None of this needs a new building or a bigger line. It needs parts, service and whole goods to be readable separately, and to be able to see each other, which is almost never how the systems were set up.
WHERE COMPANIES GET HELD BACK
The same six things come up in almost every dealer and distributor we walk. None of them are about product knowledge.
WHAT WE LEARN ON SITE
WHAT TMI CAN BUILD
Counter judgement is easiest to capture while somebody is standing at the counter. An operator inside the business →
THE $25,000 AUDIT, READ THROUGH THIS TRADE
The audit is the same instrument in every company: ten areas, ten points each, scored against a written rubric. What changes is what we go looking for. In a dealership it is mostly the distance between the three departments.
What the audit is, and what you get → What your software sprawl costs → What the repeat work costs →
THE FIRST BUILD
Parts, service and whole goods each readable on their own, weekly, from the systems already in place. This is usually first because it decides what everything else should be aimed at, and it frequently changes what the owner thought was working.
The hard part is allocation. Shared overheads, the technician who covers the counter at lunch and the salesperson who chases a part all have to land somewhere, and the rule has to be one everyone accepts before the numbers mean anything.
Service bookings that check and stage parts at the point of booking rather than on the morning, so a held bay means a job that can actually run.
The hard part is the promise. Staging parts at booking means telling a customer a later date sometimes, and that is a commercial decision the business has to make deliberately rather than discover at eight on the morning.
Claim capture at the point the technician does the work, with the documentation the manufacturer requires, and a visible clock on anything unfiled.
The hard part is the technician's notes. Manufacturers reject claims on documentation, not on the repair, so capture has to happen at the bay in the technician's own words and still come out in the form the claim needs.
THE TEST
Without asking anyone, in under a minute:
Most dealers can answer two or three, and the first one only after month end. That gap is the audit, and it usually reframes which department is actually carrying the business.
HOW WE START
What a part should cost a given account, which trade-in is worth taking, and which warranty claim is worth the argument usually live in two or three heads. We start by finding out whose, and what happens to the month when one of them retires.
Submit your info and book a call ↗COMMON QUESTIONS
Usually not. Most dealer and distribution systems hold transactions perfectly well; what they were never set up to do is let parts, service and whole goods see each other. TMI connects what you already run first, and only recommends replacing something when it is genuinely blocking the work.
No, and it is one of the reasons the work is worth doing. Where a manufacturer portal is fixed, the job is to stop re-keying out of it by hand and to make sure what it holds reaches the people who need it. The constraint is real; working inside it is normal.
Inventory accuracy is usually part of it, because a counter that does not trust the system works around the system. But the root cause is rarely counting. It is that nothing corrects the record at the moment the discrepancy is found.
We can build the capture and the process that make claims filable and visible — documentation at the point of work, and a clock on anything unfiled. What a manufacturer approves is their decision and TMI does not publish recovery figures.
Yes. A distributor without a service department has two of the three businesses rather than three, and the same pattern holds: counter pricing in people's heads, stock the team has stopped trusting, and margin that is only readable once the month closes.
That is the test. If pricing or capture adds steps at a busy counter it will not be done, and a system nobody uses is a failed build. We follow the work before building anything.
The counter, the service writer, whoever files warranty, and whoever reconciles the month. Those four conversations usually explain the whole picture faster than any system export.
The audit comes first and it is a fixed $25,000. What follows is scoped from the roadmap it produces, because the honest answer depends on how far apart the three departments have drifted.
No. The trade belongs to the people doing it. TMI builds the system that gets them the part, the history and the documentation without three phone calls.
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