{"id":4168,"date":"2021-04-07T17:54:49","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T17:54:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wheels2025dev.wpenginepowered.com\/resource\/quality-management-the-importance-of-partnerships\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T16:23:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T16:23:27","slug":"quality-management-the-importance-of-partnerships","status":"publish","type":"project","link":"https:\/\/www.wheels.com\/public\/resource\/quality-management-the-importance-of-partnerships\/","title":{"rendered":"Quality Management: The Importance of Partnerships\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Wheels, we know our clients\u00a0depend on us to keep\u00a0their business\u00a0moving. Therefore, quality is built into everything we do.\u00a0To us, quality is more than reducing defects, it\u2019s about building partnerships. And through those partnerships we learn how to get better as a service provider.<\/p>\n<h2>Identifying an Opportunity for Process Improvement<\/h2>\n<p>I\u2019d like to share a success story that demonstrates how partnerships play a key role in continuous improvement. We identified an opportunity to reduce the time between terming a vehicle and getting it to auction.\u00a0 Our goal is to pick up termed vehicles within 10 days, 80% of the time. But when we took a deeper dive into the data we identified that although we meet our target there were instances that took significantly longer.<\/p>\n<h2>Cross-Functional Kaizen Event and Root Cause Analysis<\/h2>\n<p>To improve upon this opportunity, we assembled a cross-functional team with a number of our department leaders in Remarketing, Client Services, Process and Quality Management, our transport partners, and one of our clients.\u00a0With\u00a0this team,\u00a0we led an internal week-long kaizen event, which is a quality process of working together to solve a problem or improve a particular process within a company. The team\u2019s first step was to better understand the source of these extended pickups. As with most problems, there were several causes.<\/p>\n<h2>Key Challenges Impacting Vehicle Pickup Timing<\/h2>\n<p>First, we realized our process was built around the client returning their old vehicle to the dealer when picking up their replacement. There were\u00a0a number of\u00a0reasons why this didn\u2019t occur:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The client needed to transfer tooling from one vehicle to the next.<\/li>\n<li>Seasonal business needs warranted a need for both vehicles.<\/li>\n<li>Occasionally, the old vehicle was being used at a different branch.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Next, we identified an opportunity to further standardize the escalation process and increase visibility to aging vehicles. Lastly, we recognized the transfer of information between Wheels and the transport company wasn\u2019t frequent enough to facilitate a quick response.<\/p>\n<h2>Implemented Solutions and Process Enhancements<\/h2>\n<p>As a result of our kaizen event, we\u00a0developed a new process,\u00a0established new dashboards for monitoring outliers, implemented daily huddles, increased the frequency of calls with our transport partners, and\u00a0built a\u00a0technology solution\u00a0that fostered real-time vehicle data transmission\u00a0and communication.\u00a0Then, we set up a pilot with our client partner to test.<\/p>\n<h2>Pilot Results and Full Rollout Success<\/h2>\n<p>During our pilot, we reduced average days to pick up from 10 days to 3.5 days and picked up 97% of vehicles within 7 days. Due to the success of the pilot, the new process has been rolled out to all clients.<\/p>\n<p>If you would like to partner with us on a continuous improvement project, please reach out to me\u00a0at\u00a0<a href=\"mailto:JLipes@wheels.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">JLipes@wheels.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>About the Author<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jason\u00a0Lipes\u00a0is the Sr. Director of Solution Services at Wheels, Inc. He oversees Wheels\u2019 Integration Services, Project Management Office, and Process and Quality Management teams. His focus is driving quality and continuous improvement across the organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Wheels, we know our clients\u00a0depend on us to keep\u00a0their business\u00a0moving. Therefore, quality is built into everything we do.\u00a0To us, quality is more than reducing defects, it\u2019s about building partnerships. And through those partnerships we learn how to get better as a service provider. Identifying an Opportunity for Process Improvement I\u2019d like to share a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"project_category":[17],"project_tag":[],"class_list":["post-4168","project","type-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","project_category-blog","topics-fleet-optimization"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Quality Management: The Importance of Partnerships\u00a0<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This article is part of a Wheels series on quality in fleet management, focusing on the importance of partnerships.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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