A common practice for most dealerships is to offer a free Vehicle Health Check (VHC) service for customers. A service that checks the essential components and systems of a customer’s vehicle. Any urgent work on the vehicle can be detected and reported back to the customer. Would a similar health check be worth consideration for a dealership?

A VHC carried out on a customer’s vehicle when in the workshop for service, repair or recall is seen as a useful way of determining the condition of tyres, wheels, electrics, suspension and steering for example. A VHC form quite often uses a traffic light system in order to present the status of these components and systems. Red is seen as an urgent action required, amber as cautionary requires monitoring and green as no action required. At a glance, the customer can see the results and recommendations presented in the VHC form.

A dealership, like a vehicle, has many components and systems. Buildings, stock, equipment, Dealer Management Systems (DMS) and also most importantly the personnel. Each can have its own health check category. A question for any dealership is; do any of these components and systems require urgent action or monitoring?

Considering a Dealership Health Check (DHC) it would involve more than is required for that of a VHC, but the principle is the same. Each part of the dealership can use the traffic light system of red, amber and green. Each can be inspected and checked against a required measurement. What about the building and the stock? Do they reflect the required quality and inspire customer confidence? Is the Dealer Management System (DMS) being used to its optimum? Would further training be helpful?

The personnel part of the DHC would involve checking the ongoing skills and qualifications of the vehicle technicians, the standard of customer care for those involved in sales, the management skills of the leaders for example. Then specifically the legislative requirements and demands where personnel have to comply to in order to achieve the tasks they are given in a safe and responsible way.

As one would expect in a dealership, most of the personnel would in some way be required to carry out work related driving activities. Delivering vehicles, moving stock, moving customer vehicles, driving demos, and company cars. Each driving activity requiring that the driver has the correct entitlement to drive and has a legal and valid licence. For the HR manager or Dealer Principle, or whoever is responsible for the duty of care requirements of the dealership this would also form a major role in the DHC.

Licence Link, the online licence checking service promotes the ‘The Four Principles’ for licence checking and duty of care requirements. The principles being the Duty to Protect, Avoidance of Danger, Licenced to Drive and Liability Awareness. Each is linked to current legislation and are excellent measures to use when considering duty of care requirements.

In order to indicate the level of risk, Licence Link also uses a colour coded system of flags and alerts. Coloured flags are used to show up the endorsement point levels that an employee has incurred and alerts highlight required actions.

This colour coded system gives a visual representation of the risk attached to each driver. Licence checking should be considered a major part of any Dealership Health Check.