From Paper to Parts Robots with Greg Uland

Paul J Daly: 0:00Michael, have you ever been around Kyle on a morning when, like we're traveling?Unknown: 0:10

This is Auto Collabs,

Paul J Daly: 0:12

and it's like 9am and he hasn't eaten yet?

Michael Cirillo: 0:16

Yes, I have. That was New Orleans. I

Paul J Daly: 0:19

mean, I could name a dozen places where that happened. How would you explain his demeanor at that moment?

Michael Cirillo: 0:26

Very pointed and technical.

Paul J Daly: 0:32

He's typically technical, but pointed. Pointed is one of those. I'm channeling my Kyle Mountsier vibes right now because somebody's power went out earlier, so we have to record these now. I mean, I'm not going to blame on you. What are you doing, Kyle? I don't know. It's, there's, there's a thing. So I have a really, I have a really active five year old, and so I've been spending a lot of time on a trampoline lately. Oh, okay,

Michael Cirillo: 0:58

so you're extra hungry all the time. Well, yeah, and

Paul J Daly: 1:02

all of a sudden I've forgotten. I'm like, Oh, that's right. When you're active, you get hungrier, yes, and I'm hung here and I'm hungrier, and Kyle just pulls out this bag of cheese puffs or whatever he's eating. They're magical. And you're on social you both are on Central Time. I'm on Eastern Time, and I'm just like, I will reach through this camera

Kyle Mountsier: 1:22

and slap you, punch a mug, and

Michael Cirillo: 1:26

to do an interview, it's

Kyle Mountsier: 1:28

gonna be great. We're gonna be fine, guys, I promise we're gonna be fine. Greg is a consummate professional. Yes,

Paul J Daly: 1:36

this is not my game face. My game face happens when we're in the interview. That's not right now, no, but Greg is always great to have on and he's always got a lot to talk about and he can he's one of those guys that you know, whenever we show up in the interview, he can riff on just about anything going on in the auto industry, which is why it's so much fun. So we hope you enjoy this interview with me hungry and Greg Ulin, ready to talk. Well, it's Greg. Thank you so much for joining us again on Auto Collabs. It's so fun. Whenever we get to sit together, we got to actually be in person a little bit at the NADA show. We're about to be in person again at ASOTU CON, and it's just good to be with you, my friend. Yeah, you as

Greg Uland: 2:14

well. No, it's funny. Before we started recording, Kyle and I were talking, I said, How do you guys have time for this right now? You kind of got a big show coming up. You're putting on the Super Bowl here, like two weeks.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:22

It's well, and I immediately responded with, we, with, we don't, but we always have time to hang out with you. Well, no, I honestly like that, you know, for this podcast and for those that listen, you know, we, we have some people that we know a bit more, right, because we've had face time with them and hung out, and then people that we're getting to know. And, you know, there's, there's different wonderful things about both. But it's always good to hang out with you, because, like, I feel like we can just have a conversation and talk about what's what's going on in the world of auto broadly, what's going on with the Reynolds team and and just kind of, like, it's like catching up. You know, we just happened to record it. I my,

Paul J Daly: 2:57

my question to you was, like, how do you have time for this, because baseball season is firing up, and you're like, you're like the kids, youth baseball coach, of baseball coaches, well, that's,

Greg Uland: 3:10

that's the part time job, right? This one, this one has to take priority. We have fun. You know, we're at the at the ball field pretty much every night. Sometimes we get Fridays off, but it's fun. That's the evening. That's the evening fun time, right? I

Paul J Daly: 3:22

want to see So Kyle has recently started coaching club soccer, okay? And so, like, I know there's this whole persona that I just want to feel and be. I want to see coach Greg, and I want to see coach Kyle in action, because I already have in my mind what they both look like. We're

Kyle Mountsier: 3:37

just going to be at a sodu con on the floor with whistles, just using people like faster across that, you know, it's gonna be great. It's fantastic. Good,

Paul J Daly: 3:46

fantastic. But, you know, alas, we can't talk about youth sports all day. We have a podcast to record about uh, things like robots and if and efficiency and AI, all things that, you know, really, I don't think, have made their way into youth sports yet. But are are, but are making their way into dealerships all over the place. I'm going to talk about my first one, first, my favorite first, but it's probably the least important robots. I was having got such a kick out of seeing the robots just meandering around the Reynolds booth at nada, and we begged and pleaded for you all to bring them to ASOTU CON, but you know, they're not over 21 they can't be in the casino, so Alas, they won't be here. But, but what tell us about the robots for a minute, because then we'll move on to other things. But I need to hear more about the robots first.

Greg Uland: 4:32

Yeah, so if anybody hasn't seen it, RELO is our parts delivery robot, and it's essentially automatically dispatched through the DMS. So think about the workflow where technician identifies work. It's sent to the customer electronically by the advisor. Customer approves it with a text message or just hitting, you know, approve. That comes back into the DMS, so it's added to the Ro So parts tickets created. Parts guy gets an alert says, Hey, go pick the. Three parts. Put them on rack one, he picks him, he says, finished in the DMS. And then the robot is automatically dispatched, comes picks up rack one, takes it to Bay eight, drops it off, and goes on its next run. So they mean, come on, right? So that the technician, and obviously the benefit here is the technician never stops working, never leaves the bay, never has to walk to parts, never has to really wait on parts, right? Because he's not waiting on, you know, whether it's a mobile back counter that a lot of dealerships are implementing, or it's a parts runner that he's waiting on, and then there's that interaction that always happens, right? So he's still gonna waste some time, regardless whether he's walking the parts counter or not. Now that just the parts appear for him, he continues working. So it's been pretty exciting. We got them live in dealerships now. So a lot of dealerships are coming on board and getting live. We're we're launching multiple dealers, really, every day again, getting those up and running. It's pretty exciting to see them, and starting to see the efficiency gains already,

Kyle Mountsier: 5:57

if I'm, if I'm a technician, this is like the greatest advance, because, okay, a technician is like, I don't really want to shoot videos of myself, like talking about the car, but I know it can make me more money. That's fine. I don't I hate, like, typing in every single line every ro and taking photos on a mobile app. But if I don't have to leave my Bay, and I can turn more hours per day per week. That's money in the pocket right there, right and it's just, it's just because I got efficient time. It's not because, like, I gave my advisor more to sell, or a better upsell path or things like that. It's just I already have something that needs to be turned in into into labor hours. And I kick that up, but then it's more efficient for the consumer as well. Yeah.

Greg Uland: 6:41

Well, and think about, but, I mean, think about that technician, right? So what's, what's a minute worth for a technician? What's a minute worth of a technician time for a dealership? And when you break that down, say it's five bucks, you know, just in general. So that technician and that dealership per technician has 480 units per day to sell at$5 a unit, right? So 480 minutes in an eight hour day. So they got 480 units, and they can, and let's say I don't know how many minutes is a tech call it 20 minutes, right? That he's walking, waiting, doing whatever each day. Easy, that's and that's

Paul J Daly: 7:14

if they don't, and that's if they don't start talking about the game at the counter. Yeah. So that's

Greg Uland: 7:18

inventory that's literally just spoiled. It's gone. Like, if you think about it from an inventory perspective, like you're never, you'll never sell, like, perishable inventory, right? 100% Yeah. And as soon as it's gone, it's gone. So the more inventory, if you think about it that way, that you can, you can save and ultimately sell for that technician and that dealership. I mean, that is just going to continue to exponentially grow over time.

Kyle Mountsier: 7:39

Yeah, I actually have a friend. He works for a part supplier for stellantis, Nissan, a bunch of OEMs. They are frame welders, right? And their their entire business model is built around line up, time and scrap rate, right? So, like it like their best, their best lines are like 85% uptime, uptime, 1% scrap rate, right? And there are so many production style businesses that are thinking about time as inventory, right? We've typically gone at like bays as inventory, right? Bay has to turn 11 hours a day to be, you know, to be profitable and efficient, but you're talking about a whole different inventory, you know, viewpoint and when and how are you exposing that data? Because is that data like something that you're thinking, Oh, we should expose that to the dealer as, like a as a KPI, really?

Greg Uland: 8:36

So when you think about it, there's, there's a KPI that exists today that's not as finite as what we've been talking about, which is tech productivity, right? So what's our benchmark on tech productivity? Meaning, if the Tech has eight hours in the shop, right? What percentage of those eight hours is he actually working on a vehicle? And when you look at Tech productivity over time, I don't know if you've looked at this before, it's actually going down, which is, like, not what we want, right? So over the last, yeah, so ever last like 510, years, we've gone from 90% to 88 to 87 and a half. So the trend is actually down on technical activity. What's the reason for that? Well, I mean, there's a few things. One, vehicles are getting more and more complex to diagnose. I mean, that's, that's a part, oh, like the hour Diags taking a full hour, right? Right? So that's, that's a part of it. A part of it is the other tasks that we're asking technicians to do, which, again, some of them are valuable, right? But if a tech now has to take a video, right? Certainly they need to do an MPI. It needs to be, we put pressure on them to make it a good MPI. Have good notes. This isn't necessarily there. It's

Kyle Mountsier: 9:37

no longer like, I remember the old API MPIs. It's like, you got the line through the thing, right? It's

Paul J Daly: 9:42

just a straight line. It's like, yeah, I checked all those. I didn't even check them all. I just drew a lot through them all. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot more tasks. So how can

Greg Uland: 9:49

we claw back some of that time, right? And this is a great way to grow it, to do it, just keep them turning the wrenches, because that's, first of all, it's what they like to do. Second of all, it's what makes them money. Third of all, it's what makes the dealership money. Like, we. Got to sell the hours everybody

Paul J Daly: 10:01

wants it to happen. Yeah, look,

Kyle Mountsier: 10:03

you know what? You know where I think we're going to regain a lot of technician efficiency is if the vehicle can pull itself into the slot and the old one can park itself again. I mean, that's what I mean. That's why Carmax, their their production system, is so efficient, is because the technicians never spend time in the vehicle, moving it. They have people that deliver it to the bay, and then they remove it from the bay, and so if the vehicle can do that, like what I just saw, it was a video of a test, like a model three, leaving off the line for right onto the carrier, like right over to the carrier. That's a good point. Well, I didn't expect my robot question to get us, get us this far, but I think it's a really meaningful conversation that makes a measurable difference to be thinking through these items in I mean, one of the most sustainably valued place of a dealership and fixed stops. And I also love that Reynolds is like from paper to parts, robots and everything in between, well and paper to parts. That's a great advertising just came out. Came out, paper to parts, robots and everything is all illiterate, you know, all the stuff. Well, love it. So we were actually Greg, we were actually talking this morning on on our daily podcast about efficiencies and scale. And I think that there's two places where we're finding that be a big question mark in the industry. One is like growing groups trying to find efficiencies in scale, instead of just like growing acquiring a new store and letting it be it's like, no, we're going to roll up these things into software, people management or anything like that. So that's like one piece of it that obviously Reynolds is focused on, because you have a lot of the largest groups in the country. But also, when you think about the data efficiencies at scale and understanding and leveraging data. And I think you know, what I've seen Reynolds do over the past, really, let's call it like five to six years, is start acquiring these companies that allow you to have touch points across the retail and fit stops environment. And now you're starting to tie all those together to, like, enhance both of those places of efficiency. Can you talk to how some of that has been going, especially as the last year we were at amplify, you announced spark. Ai, right? How is that going? Like, what's, what's current status on that?

Greg Uland: 12:15

No, it's going really well. You know, when we look at acquiring companies, obviously we're looking to create efficiencies for the dealership. I mean that at the end of the day, the success of the store is really what's at the heart of what we're doing, including our acquisition. So we aren't looking at an acquisition and saying, Okay, this this company is something that maybe we don't do or don't do well, so let's go ahead and buy it. It's more so how can we help our dealers be as successful as possible? And we do that through development, we do it through support, but we also do it through acquisition. So you know, some of the recent acquisitions, you look at TSD with with rental software, right? You look at AWS, with insurance products, you look at auto vision, and was re contract we rolled into auto vision and the used vehicle management space. There's a lot of these, companies that we've bought and we've incorporated them into our retail management system. So taking, you know, the DMS, obviously at the center, and building it out both through development and acquisition, but when we when we acquire these companies, we really want to make sure that the data underneath all of these tools and all of these products is tied together. It's a single a single system, and we've always talked about it as a single system with a single unique identifier for every customer, every vehicle and every transaction. And that's that's really, really hard to do, but when you think about it historically with software, in order to do anything powerful, you need to have that kind of single, unique identifier, right? And if you don't, then you have all of these different tools where just use a salesperson as an example. I mean, there have been different different documentations over the years that have showed, hey, a salesperson is going to touch, you know, seven different tools. When they sell a car, it's probably more than that. You know, they have to enter a VIN in four different places. And so there's all these inefficiencies, and what happens is you end up with duplicate information. You end up with inaccurate information, and then just missing information in different tools. So none of them can function at a really, really high level, or at least as high as what they're expected to. And it creates these inefficiencies where it really slows. In this example, a salesperson down instead of the intended impact of speeding them up, they have to go to all these different places and sell them down. Yeah. So you look at that, then you look forward and you say, okay, so if that happened with software, where these, these software tools, were slowing people down because they had to go to all these different places, what's going to happen with AI? And that's where we're heading now, you know, with with all of these AI tools, and they're out there everywhere, right? There's a, there's a new AI tool every four hours. I feel like

Paul J Daly: 14:48

maybe three hours. If you're subscribed to emails, you get the new announcement every three hours, right?

Greg Uland: 14:54

But, but the tool itself, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna actually take action. Question. It's going to do things, rather than just having information and enabling salespeople, in this example, or anybody else in the dealership to operate, it's going to go do some functions. And if it has inaccurate information, if it has duplicate information, if it has missing information, it's going to do the wrong thing, or it's going to recommend the wrong thing, right? If you keep that person in the loop, it's not going to be able to function properly, so, so rather than causing inefficiencies, without tying all these things together, you're you're causing the wrong thing to happen, right? And you think of the implications of that, when you're reaching out to a customer and you're making an offer that can be a big deal, right? And being able to tie all these things together becomes more and more and more important as we move into the

Kyle Mountsier: 15:46

future. Yeah, when, when I actually, as I'm thinking about and listening to you talk about this, it's actually shocking to me that, and I talk about this a lot with the tech side of stuff that I'm thinking about and like, like, speeding up websites, right? We actually find, and you see this with any technology or any process, sometimes, actually, a lot of the times, the more savvy, technologically forward thinking dealerships end up buying or or supplying their team with more and more technology over time, right at an attempt to increase customer, you know, satisfaction, or, you know, engagement, and increase the infici the efficiency of the team member, all the while they're only adding complexity, instead of driving efficiency, which is doing the adverse of what the sales pitch is to do those things. The

Paul J Daly: 16:51

technology that's so interesting that you bring that up. I was reading an article today of who wrote it, a guy named Peter, just a really well known technologist, and he was talking about how the use of AI, even in simple tasks, is making people very inefficient. And one of the examples he gave was writing emails, and he said, Okay, say, my daughter is sick today, and I need to tell my boss I'm not going to be there. So he goes in and he has a little thing drafts a prompt, right my boss an email explaining I won't be there because my daughter said, my daughter's sick. Hello, Bob. I hope you're well, right? And it's like, I'm writing to inform you that my daughter is ill today, therefore I will not be able to fulfill my obligations, right? I will do my best to get right. So he does that. He goes, Okay, obviously I'm not sending that. My email would be like, Hey, Gary, you know, whoever is sick, I won't be in the office. And then he goes through a series of prompts of what he would need to do to get it to respond like that. And he was just talking about how layering technology on problems, he called him horseless carriages right now, and it could easily become that, if we're not being very considerate and deliberate about how and when we're deploying the tech. So just reminded me that, Kyle, when you said that, but I just, I feel it my own life, right? Because we're heavy users and heavy adopters of the new technology to try to get the use and that, that is the consideration. Is this actually making it faster, or is it making it slower, and that's a little dumber in the process? Yeah,

Greg Uland: 18:15

and that's where you I think you have to focus on the engine or the horse, and that analogy, rather than the carriage, right? The carriage is the tool. It's the thing that spits out the email for you, but that that tool is going to give you really bad output if it doesn't have access to all the information that's in your head, right? So same thing applies to a business or a dealership. Any AI tool needs access to a unified AI data layer so that all of the information that's in your head, that's in your CRM, that's in your DMS, that's in any other tool that you have, if you have a CDP, if you have a market like all these tools, any AI application needs access to those and it needs to be a single, unified AI data layer so that it can actually create an output that you don't have to rewrite. Yes,

Kyle Mountsier: 19:05

yeah, and why and why. It's actually like, I keep going back to this. Like, when we started digital marketing, we were like, good news, everyone, we're gonna be able to track everything. You'll know 100% of what the dollars that you're spending are doing. And then it's like, good news, everyone, we got CDPs, you'll know everything right. Good news, everyone, AI came to save it. You don't have to lift a finger. And the reality is, is that, like micro touch points for each of those only solve a portion of the problem, and until you integrate your ecosystem and like, tie it all like you, I love the fact that you said, like, there's a unique identifier for X, whatever x is like, until you you. Tell it, that's the unique identifier, and here's the connective tissue for all of that, nothing about the connective tissue actually matters. And so I would say, like, if a dealership or a software provider isn't thinking about what their unique identifier is, in their vernacular is, and making sure that that unique identifier can connect to x other unique identifier that's important to the data set, then, like, you're literally just gonna spin your wheels over and over and over. So, man, I I'm excited, because I can't wait to, like, see this put into practice and into play, and we'll be talking more about it at ASOTU CON, and obviously, kind of following, following the story, because I think this is it's still an unfolding conversation, and we'll figure out where it goes.

Paul J Daly: 20:51

Without a doubt, it's like not even close to be we haven't even started to unfold. Because we haven't even started. We haven't Well, we look forward to being with you and your team in person, both on the stages and the exhibit halls and the receptions and all the things and just a little bit here. It's coming quick, but Thank you always for being just such an advocate of dealers and their goals and moving their, you know, moving their initiatives forward and helping us all. You know, think a little bit broader about how things are connected. Okay,

Greg Uland: 21:19

they drive our world, the automotive retail world, is the best, best industry on the planet, and those retailers are the ones that that make it all happen. So I think an amen to that all of our responsibilities to make sure that

Paul J Daly: 21:30

they're successful. Indeed. Greg, thank you so much for being with us today. Always my

Greg Uland: 21:34

pleasure. See you soon, guys. You

Michael Cirillo: 21:40

know it'd be interesting, though, is if we put a hungry countdown timer on our episodes, where it's like, halfway through, because, you know, one of the four on a call is going to be hungry.

Paul J Daly: 21:51

First go with the host. One of the three of us is going to

Michael Cirillo: 21:53

be and then you can count them down to when I give an abrupt ending. You know, because, like, sometimes we're like, great at our closes, and we're like, All right, thanks for joining us on Auto Collabs. And they were like,

Kyle Mountsier: 22:05

off screen.

Paul J Daly: 22:09

Now you know the rest of the story. I love the part when we're talking about robots, and that conversation is going back to food at their booth when they were the little robots were running around with water and beverages and things like that. But I had no idea, like, the way, the way Greg and they're approaching just fixed operations revenue, and you minutes being units of production, and just like, optimizing for minutes of production. And look, I

Kyle Mountsier: 22:34

thought when I was in sales trying to figure out how to make the desk act like a bay, like, like deals per desk, like hours per day that I was savvy now I'm like these cats are trying to figure out minutes per day as units of inventory Come on,

Paul J Daly: 22:49

perishable inventory that once it's gone, it's gone. So this little robot is going to help us. That's

Kyle Mountsier: 22:54

a level of efficiency that I think our industry has to get to like and well, okay, let me just say our industry, broadly I talked about this is on that right when you look at production lines time, you know, like the Toyotas, you know, just in time manufacturing that so many people have, have have assumed as their manufacturing principle, like you have to be diligent About every minute, every every millisecond, every everything that passes through. QA, yeah. And the fact that we run our dealerships on, like, our hope of solar car today, you know, is like, it's kind of wild to me. You know, there's,

Michael Cirillo: 23:34

there is a parts manager at a dealership somewhere in America or Canada right now opening a box in the back being like, oh, a catalytic converter from a 1993 Oldsmobile. Oh, man, what do we do with it? So I think about this and its effect on obsolescence, which we know is a huge issue, and just the dollars that are sitting in boxes that will never get sold, huge impact. Well, listen, I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation with Greg uland and a very hungry Paul J Daly Kyle Mountsier and myself. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for joining us here on Auto Collabs. Sign

Unknown: 24:10

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