AUTO RECYCLERS MANAGEMENT BOOT CAMPS

Do you want to accelerate your business? Read on and find out how.

Salvage Wire is investigating the potential for an Auto Recyclers Management Boot Camp led by Donald Cooper.

About Donald's “Accelerate Your Business” Management Boot Camp:

Who should attend?

1. This programme is specifically designed for business owners and their management teams from small and medium sized businesses, up to £15 million in sales.
2. Donald has successfully worked in over 40 different industries throughout the world, so whatever you do this will be enormously helpful.
3. Experience shows that the more managers who attend from the same company, the more extraordinary the results in the business.

How Donald helps business owners and managers:
Donald has helped thousands of businesses to achieve the following 5 outcomes:

1. Create a compelling competitive advantage.
2. Market and promote on a limited budget.
3. Create a clear vision for an extraordinary and more profitable future...and the Action Plan to get them there.
4. Manage every part of their business more proactively and effectively.
5. Create a top-performing team, and deal more effectively with non-performance.

The Extraordinary value:
Each delegate will take away:

1. A clear understanding of how to be a world-class manager in the business.
2. A complete handout of Donald’s bottom-line insights and real-life help examples.
3. Donald’s complete step-by-step Implementation Guide that will help you to more effectively manage your marketing, your team, your future....and your bottom line.
4. A renewed energy and commitment to be extraordinary, successful and profitable. Mediocrity is no longer and option!
5. Valuable insights into how to grow a successful business and also have and extraordinary life.
6. An opportunity to sign up to receive Donald’s monthly Management E-Newsletter at no cost.

For more details and the opportunity to respond, please click here 

Moving Written-Off Vehicles Around The World

Some time ago I was asked to investigate the background to an Audi TT that had been written off in the Channel Islands, what I found proved that written-off vehicles can be easily moved around the world.

Following an accident, an Audi TT was being inspected by the insurance company, the insurance engineer wasn’t happy about the vehicle and asked me to complete some further investigations.
The vehicle concerned had a Jersey registration and was Left Hand Drive - not unusual in the Channel Islands given their close proximity to mainland Europe, but the main difference to the majority of LHD vehicles was the speedo and distance recorders where in miles, not kilometres.

The registration paperwork confirmed that the vehicle had come into Jersey from Poland, but this didn’t explain the speedo reading miles per hour, so a little more detective work was required.
Audi UK were able to confirm that the vehicle was produced for the North American marketplace, and some extra work on the NMVTIS (National Motor Vehicle Title Information System) database in the US gave us the information required, the vehicle had been registered in New Jersey and written off after an insurance claim.

None of this was recorded on any of the documents provided to the authorities in the Channel Islands when they registered the vehicle, the owner of the vehicle had no knowledge of the previous history and wasn’t aware that the vehicle had been previously written-off.

So what does this tell us? That written-off vehicles can move across borders with impunity and lose their ‘written-off’ status; that potentially dangerous vehicles could be sold with no checks on roadworthiness or safety; that the vehicle could have been stolen and cloned to a different identity; that the auto recycling and motor salvage industry needs to do more to track written-off vehicles across the world, making certain that potential owners are aware of the previous history of the vehicle, and setting standards for roadworthiness of any repaired vehicles.

The correct forum for this will be the International Round Table on Auto Recycling (IRT) that is being held in Japan in October, for more details refer to http://irt-autorecycling.org/next-irt-kushiro-hokkaido-japan

If you have a vehicle that you would like investigating, please contact Salvage Wire through the web site or at admin@salvagewire.com

Time to Think

Tick! Another second gone that you will never get back; we have 86,400 seconds in each day, on average we will be sleeping for 28,800 seconds so there are 57,600 seconds available for us to use, please allow me to take around 120 seconds of your daily allowance.

One of the best pieces of advice I received when moving jobs many years ago was “take time to think and write in pencil, because you can rub out those ideas that were no good”.

22 years later this is even more relevant in the current business climate we face.

I mentioned this to one customer a few months ago and he immediately came back to me saying ‘I haven’t got the time to do that, I’m too busy’.

Many years ago I regularly attended evening meetings for local Motor Traders and noticed that one of the more regular attendees had missed a few of the meetings – he had been in a serious car accident and spent over 6 weeks in hospital before recuperating at home for another 3 months, when I saw him again he was a changed man – yes the accident had affected his mobility, but more importantly it had changed the course of his company, for the first time in nearly 10 years he had had time to think. As a result he now takes every Tuesday morning away from the office to sit and think, and the company has grown, diversified and is still very profitable 20 years later.

A car accident is a bit extreme, and I hope that this isn’t the catalyst for anyone reading this item, but it could be an illness or other type of injury that forces a period of time away from the business. I know, I have just spent 2 weeks at home with a bad back and have had plenty of thinking time – technology helps, the I-Pad is easy to use when you are laid flat on your back, and you don’t need a pencil and eraser.

But there is a better way that avoids accidents or illness; set aside a regular time each week away from the day to day activities of the business, and take yourself away from the office so you won’t be tempted to get involved in anything else – switch off your phone as well.

Many struggle with how to fill their thinking time, especially if the idea is new to them – there are no hard or fast rules to this, it is more a case of what works for the individual, personally I like to start with this question:

Why am I in business, what am I doing now and what do I want to be doing in 3 years’ time? 

This can then help to drive thinking into different areas such as:

• Sales – weekly, monthly, could they be better, how can we sell more?
• Costs – weekly, monthly, annually, are there areas we can save money on?
• Staff – do I have the right number of employees, the right type of person in the correct role; are they doing the best for my company or department?
• Customers – are we attracting more customers? What can we do to attract more, give better service, and make them buy from us rather than the guy down the road or on the internet?
• Business – Don’t be afraid to question the viability of the business, can it work as it is or would it be better to completely change the focus of the company, or relocate, or even sell out because the land you own is worth more than the company could ever return to you.

This won’t be completed in one session; it will probably be a few weeks before there is a good vision for your company and its future, before the hardest bit – making the changes. 

Change Management will be dealt with in another issue and this is where your thinking time comes into its own; people do not like change! Despite assurances that change is welcomed, deep down there will be anxiety, stress, worry and much more, and this will be reflected by resistance to the new ideas, reluctance to make the changes requested, and a tendency to revert to old ways of doing things. A regular ‘time-out’ is important because it enables you to reflect on progress, remind yourself why the changes are necessary, and how to continue with the changes required to improve your business and succeed in that vision.

The stark truth is this, without regular thinking time there may not be a business to think about in 3 years’ time!

Join Automotive Recyclers From Around the World at the 8th Annual IRT

The 8th Annual International Roundtable on Automotive Recycling (IRT), taking place October 1-4 in Kushiro, Japan, will bring together leaders in the automotive recycling, insurance, and collision repair industries for what has truly become a global event. Registration is now available at: http://irt-autorecycling.org/next-irt-kushiro-hokkaido- japan.

The Japanese Automobile Recyclers Alliance (JARA), will be hosting the IRT. Program highlights will include a welcoming night reception at the Kushiro Prince Hotel, facilitated roundtable discussions, factory tours and sightseeing opportunities, a BBQ, country reports from ARA, ARC, EGARA, ARAA, MAARA, KARA, AARTI, JARA, and much more.

For more information, travel information, program agenda, and to register for the IRT, please visit the following website: http://irt-autorecycling.org/next-irt-kushiro- hokkaido-japan. 

International Dismantling Information System (IDIS)

Free, complimentary, gratis, on the house, for nothing! You cannot say that about much these days, especially technical information from vehicle manufacturers. 

There must be a catch, I hear you say; only if you are not in the automotive recycling industry. IDIS is the International Dismantling Information System that all vehicle manufacturers selling cars in Europe have to provide information to, and this data is then available free of charge to vehicle dismantlers and recyclers across Europe.

The database is designed to promote the safe and economical treatment of end of life vehicles (ELV’s) and is part of the European Union’s ELV Directive.

Information is split into a number of different areas, including Batteries, Pyrothechnics, Fuels, Air Conditioning and more. Data included highlights number of components, what they are made from, tools required and the processes needed to remove these components from the vehicle.

From IDIS you can find out that a fully specced new Mercedes S-Class Hybrid could have up to 24 batteries in it when you include keys, tyre pressure sensors and more, or that the High Voltage Battery of the Tesla Model S is a Lithium-Ion unit that weighs around 600KG.

Safety documents feature heavily in the IDIS contents, including Pyrothechnics, Hybrid Batteries, LPG/CNG and all give lots of good and useful safety advice. Vehicle Manufacturers back this up with their own unique advice and recommendations within the information given for their models.

Reports can be printed from IDIS for each vehicle model giving all pre-treatment and dismantling information for that variant that can be taken to the workstation and used during the de-pollution and dismantling process to ensure full, safe and economical processing of end of life vehicles. 

To access IDIS go to www.idis2.com where you can register on-line and take a tour of the site.

More thoughts on VIC

Over the last few days a number of comments have been made about the decision by the Department for Transport to scrap the VIC check and initiate a working group to look at alternatives to this.

The detail from the DfT contained a number of comments that gave hints about their desired outcomes for this working group.

• considering a statutory basis for the insurance industry’s code of practice about written-off vehicles;
• The roadworthiness and crashworthiness of rebuilt written-off vehicles should be subject to checking.  The Department is committed to investigating this further with industry.  

These can be interpreted as ‘we WILL introduce statutory regulation of written off vehicles’ and ‘repaired vehicles WILL be subject to enhanced checks before being allowed back into use’.

UK Motor Insurers already have the voluntary code of practice in place, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) who ‘own’ the Code of Practice should now step in to enforce the code, get their member companies performing to the highest standards possible and show the working group and the DfT that they can be trusted to enforce standards fully and correctly before any legislation comes in.

The Motor Vehicle Dismantlers Association (MVDA) and the British Vehicle Salvage Federation (BVSF) both need to show that their members are of the highest quality; they dismantle category A and B vehicles to the highest environmental standard, make certain that these vehicles are destroyed and issue Certificates of Destruction. This can be done by setting the appropriate standards for these members, with transparent auditing and compliance it can be shown that these companies are the most trusted salvage and recoiling operations in the UK and should deal with the majority of all written off vehicles.

Seems simple really........

So VIC is no more, what next?

The UK Government announced today that the Vehicle Identity Check scheme (VIC) is to be closed; having spent millions, checked hundreds of thousands of vehicles and identified less than 50 suspect vehicles, it certainly cannot be called a success.
The scheme will run until October 2015, in the meantime a working group will be formed to investigate the next steps.
I understand that making the current voluntary code of practice mandatory is an option; action that must be welcomed by the industry.

Personally I hope that the working group is able to bring strong enforcement action on this issue, including an updating of the current code, stopping category A and B vehicles leaving the country, Certificate of Destructions being mandatory for these vehicles,  a suitable roadworthiness check for all category C and D salvage returning to use, and stiff fines for companies that flout the regulations.

It certainly looks like progress is being made, we won’t mourn the loss of VIC, lets embrace sensible regulations going forward that protect OUR industry, drivers and customers.